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Draft Guide to the Production and Provision of Information about Health and Healthcare Interventions
Section 4 - Informing the content of information materials
You will need to identify several different types of information before producing a first draft. In addition to the information about the relevant health condition(s) and/or healthcare intervention(s), you will need background information. Here we consider such information about your audience and the contexts in which your information package will be used.
What do people want to know?
For your package to be useful, it must provide the kinds of information that people need and want. Make sure your initial thoughts about what information will be included corresponds with what your audience wants. Even if you are trying to help people adopt a particular behaviour (such as stopping smoking or accepting vaccination) you are more likely to succeed if you find out what issues surrounding these choices matter to people.
People might have questions about:
| What causes a condition |
| Symptoms, signs and problems associated with a particular condition |
| Why and how screening and diagnostic tests are done and what the results might mean |
| What forms of care are recommended for people with a particular condition |
| Which treatments might help them |
| What alternatives or choices they have |
| What the treatments involve, how they are likely to help and what kinds of risks they entail |
| What the effects of having no treatment would be |
| What kinds of prognoses are associated with particular conditions and interventions |
| Which symptoms need urgent attention |
| How healthcare for people with their condition is usually organised |
| What they might experience during and after episodes of care |
| What other people have felt like and how they have coped with particular conditions and treatments |
| How a condition or treatment might affect their daily life |
| How to help themselves and their families |
| What kinds of help they might get when, from whom, and how. |
What do people already know and believe?
You will be able to produce information more relevant to your intended audience by finding out what they already believe. If your information is to be useful, they will need to be able to relate it to their current perceptions. If you identify any commonly-held misconceptions, you will be able to address these directly in the information that you provide, as the examples here illustrate.
Example 1
When developing an information leaflet about wisdom teeth removal we spoke to dental healthcare professionals and people who had consulted them about their wisdom teeth. We learnt that most of the professionals had adopted recent guidelines and were no longer routinely removing impacted wisdom teeth. However, many people still thought that most wisdom teeth would need to be removed. These discussions suggested that the leaflet should address the mismatch between actual clinical practice and what people thought should be happening. So the publication explained that not all wisdom teeth cause problems and not all wisdom teeth have to be removed. Example 2
A team that was developing information leaflets for people with cataracts held focus group discussions with people who had the condition. While talking about surgery, they found that many of these (mainly older) people remembered bad experiences with anaesthesia. Having identified this common worry, the team was able to reassure people via the leaflet that modern anaesthetics were safer with fewer side effects than older ones. The focus group discussions also revealed beliefs such as 'a cataract has to be ripe before it can be removed'. These were addressed in a section called 'myths you may have heard'. (Source: Entwistle VA
et al., 1998). |
What information is currently given to people?
This knowledge can help you decide what information you need to include and how your package will 'fit in' to the overall pattern of information provision for these people.
Healthcare professionals are an important source of information for many people. You need to know what information they usually give to your intended audience (either during conversations or via information materials) and whether the material you plan to provide is consistent with this. If you are thinking of advising people to ask their healthcare professionals about particular issues, you need to be sure that they can provide up-to-date information and good advice about those issues. If there are differences of opinion amongst the professionals about the relevant health condition or intervention, you need to consider how to address this.
As voluntary organisations also provide a lot of information about health issues, it is worth checking this information to inform your work.
More generally, as you develop your own materials look out for any views expressed about your topic in the public domain.
Organisation and delivery of healthcare
Patterns of practice may vary across healthcare settings. Awareness of these and the reasons for them is particularly important if you are producing information that is to be widely used. For example, it may be inappropriate to use a phrase such as 'Your doctor will carry out tests A, B and C' if there is a great deal of variability about which tests doctors carry out.
If you are developing materials for use throughout NHSScotland, you need to give particular consideration to patterns of care for people living in remote or rural areas, including the Islands. When discussing treatments available in specialist centres, you should alert people to the possibility that they may not be available locally.
Awareness of the way healthcare is organised and delivered to members of your intended audience will also be important when thinking about the distribution of your information materials.
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