How can you make health research accessible? Connect with your audience

31 Oct

Communicating health research effectively isn’t just about clarity and language, it’s also about connection. Writing accessibly, focusing on people’s needs, and making research discoverable helps studies reach broader audiences and encourages participation from all communities. For anyone who is developing digital and social media content to support clinical trials (whether that’s for recruitment purposes, or participant communications and newsletters) here are some handy tips to make this more accessible and effective.

1. Know your audience

Before writing a single word, it’s essential to understand who you’re talking to and what they need from your content – that might be patients, but it might also be clinical staff in your recruitment sites or community partners. Knowing your audience helps shape tone, structure, and language, and this helps your message to land in a way that’s relevant and respectful. The more precisely you understand your readers’ motivations for taking part in a study or the barriers that might hold them back, the more effectively you can connect with them.

2. Keep it simple - use clear language

Health and medical research is the one area of science with the broadest appeal – it affects all of us. While illness and disability might mean different things to different people, it’s best practice to write in a way that anyone can understand.

Generally, when writing about health research studies, whether to support recruitment or share findings, aim for a reading age of around nine. That might seem challenging, particularly when you’re talking about complex research - but it is possible if you keep your content relevant and don’t get lost in the weeds of explaining research methods, for example.

This doesn’t mean oversimplifying; it means writing with clarity and inclusivity in mind. Use shorter sentences and familiar words, introduce concepts, and structure your content around the challenge, aims, process, and outcomes of the study. This can help to make the study more approachable for those that may feel that research isn’t for them.

3. Focus on what matters

Content about health research studies are most useful when it taps into people’s natural information-seeking habits – can you align your content with what people are likely searching for online about a particular health condition? Consider the questions and concerns potential participants in your studies might have about their illness (unless you’re recruiting healthy volunteers), or the big unanswered question that the research is tackling. Use this as a segue to talk about the research in your study, and how it’s helping people and communities.

4. Include lived experiences and real stories

Summaries and abstracts are essential for scientific communication, but they often miss the human element. Interviewing researchers, clinicians, or patients adds depth and authenticity. These real-life perspectives help explain why the research matters, how it affects real people, and give the kind of insights that standard lay summaries can’t - making research more relatable and meaningful.

Consider including an interview with a clinical academic and ask them to share common patient concerns, or speak to a public contributor about their own lived experience of illness. When it comes to showcasing results at the end of your study, including the human-interest story here is key.

5. Create multiple formats

Armed with those lived experiences, turn them into short videos, create social media carousels, produce an infographic, or you could even host a short podcast series with researchers and collaborators. Different media formats will help to carry your message across your various channels and improve engagement.

6. Think inclusively

Accessibility goes beyond language. Content about research should always aim to be as inclusive as possible, highlighting how studies support underrepresented communities – whether that’s by gender, ethnicity, geography, or socioeconomic background. This could be a simple acknowledgement that a health condition disproportionately affects a particular community, for example. Inclusive content like this helps to foster trust so that the research resonates with everyone that might benefit from it.

7. Break down barriers

For people less likely to seek medical support, clinical research can feel daunting. For example, people might feel particularly concerned about a scan or treatment that your study is evaluating - or they might not like visiting a hospital or university. When recruiting participants, communications activities can play a role alongside carefully planned community engagement in helping to break down some of the barriers around taking part in a trial.

How can you learn about these barriers? Well-designed trials are generally supported by a panel of public contributors who might be able to share with you the common concerns of a particular population of patients. By acknowledging these in your communications, or even making efforts to debunk them, your content can support efforts to reduce uncertainty and make the research feel more approachable.

8. Optimise for searchability

If research content isn’t findable, it might as well not exist. In many cases, your efforts to promote a trial with carefully-crafted content will likely only give you a spike in traffic – whether your content is hosted on a website or social media. To tackle this, consider optimising your content for search engines (SEO) and AI-driven tools. This can help the right people find your studies later on down the line when they’re looking for trustworthy health information, and is particularly relevant for longer-form, written pieces.

You really don’t have to be an SEO expert, here are some top tips:

Include clear headings and make the right use of H1 and H2 tags.
Include relevant keywords near the top and throughout your content.
Structure your writing in a way that speaks to the way people phrase questions in search engines or AI queries.
Ensure your page has the right metadata, or your pages are in the correct schema for your content (speak to your institution’s IT team if you ‘re unable to access these backend sections of your site).
You could also add an FAQ page - the structured question-and-answer format is simple for search software to scan, understand, and extract direct information from.

Read about how the Campus team have created feature content for the National Institute for Health and Care Research’s Be Part of Research campaign, and learn about our training.