How to make health research accessible: Connect with your audience
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Communicating health research effectively isn’t just about clarity, it’s about connection. Writing accessibly, focusing on people’s needs, and making research discoverable helps studies reach broader audiences and encourages participation from all communities. With a particular focus on clinical studies involving patients, here are some ways to make your content 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 – whether that’s patients, funders or clinical staff. 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 and barriers, the more effectively you can connect with them.
2. Use clear, simple language
One of the most important principles in research communication is writing in a way that your target audience can understand. Health and medical research is the one area of science with the broadest appeal – it affects all of us.
Generally, when writing about clinical studies, whether to support recruitment or share findings, aim for a reading age of around nine. This doesn’t mean oversimplifying; it means writing with clarity and inclusivity in mind. Use shorter sentences and familiar words, and structure your content around the challenge, aims, process, and outcomes of the study. This can help to make the research more approachable for those that may feel that research isn’t for them.
3. Focus on topics that people care about
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 you’re communicating, and how the study is helping.
4. Include lived experiences
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 perspective help explain why the research matters, how it affects real people, and give real insights in ways that standard 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. Written quotes or short videos with participants will help to carry your message across various channels and improve engagement.
5. Consider under-represented groups
Accessibility goes beyond language. Research content should be inclusive, 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. Inclusive content like this helps to foster trust so that the research resonates with everyone that might benefit from it.
6. Break down barriers to participation
For people less likely to seek medical support, clinical research can feel daunting. When recruiting participants, communication can play a role alongside carefully planned community engagement to help reduce uncertainty about taking part in a trial. For example, people might feel particularly concerned about a scan or treatment that your study is evaluating - or simply visiting a hospital or university.
Well-designed trials are generally supported by a panel of public contributors who might be able to share these barriers with you. By acknowledging these your communications, or even making efforts to demystify them, you can help to remove uncertainty and make the research feel more approachable.
7. Optimise for searchability
If research content isn’t findable, it might as well not exist. Your promotional efforts will likely only give you a spike in traffic – whether your content is hosted on website or social media.
It’s always best practice to optimise content for search engines (SEO) and AI-driven tools so that the right people find your studies when they’re looking for trustworthy health information. This is particularly relevant for longer-form, written pieces. Make sure you include clear headings, relevant keywords and structured content that speaks to the way people phrase questions in search engines or AI queries.
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.
