Plain language,
on a public deadline.
An NHS regional comms unit rewrote three years of public-facing material before the next inspection cycle.
The simplest test: my mother could read the new letter. She still phoned, but only once.— Dr. Fern Adekoya, Director of Public Health, NHS South
Three years of letters, leaflets, and a website nobody could read.
NHS South's public-health unit had inherited a content estate written by twelve different authors over three administrations. The plain-English audit gave the existing material a Year 9 reading age. The target was Year 6.
The catch: the inspection cycle gave us fourteen weeks, including the Christmas freeze.
We hired one editor for the project, not twelve.
The studio embedded a single editor inside NHS South's comms team for the duration. We rewrote the most-trafficked twenty letters first, then expanded the system outward to leaflets, the website, and the recorded phone tree.
We co-wrote the style guide with the clinical-governance lead. It got signed in one meeting because she'd helped write it.
Patient phone enquiries dropped 27% by month three.
The reading age came down to Year 6. The 4.2M impressions across owned and earned channels mattered less than the 27% drop in patient phone enquiries — the proxy for whether the new letters worked.
Eleven of the fourteen regional NHS trusts have asked to reuse the system. The studio said yes, free, on the condition that nobody adds a slogan.