Health Literacy Team Community Engagement: Lung and Bowel Pathways

To work closely with the Health Literacy Team to support their community engagement work, ensuring patient facing information is clearer, more accessible, and shaped by genuine public insight.

Why This Matters

High‑quality, easy‑to‑understand health information is essential for improving early diagnosis, supporting informed decision‑making, and reducing inequalities. Ensuring that documents are co‑designed with the public, rather than reviewed at the end, helps services create materials that people can actually use and trust.

What we did

Throughout 2024–2026, we supported two major workstreams. Across both workstreams, we helped the team access real lived‑experience insight at the right stage of development.

Lung Cancer Thoracic Surgery Document – The team attended our support groups multiple times for group work on the draft document. Our members provided open, honest feedback that directly shaped improvements to this and future materials.

National Bowel Screening Literature – We gathered community feedback through our readers panel and wider community conversations, asking the public how letters could be improved to support earlier diagnosis. We also piloted an online focus group, attended by VCSE community leaders, who provided valuable insights on behalf of their service users.

Outcomes

What we achieved!

The Health Literacy Team gained high‑quality, actionable community feedback that strengthened key national and regional documents. We demonstrated the value of involving the public early and meaningfully, trialled new engagement approaches, and built strong foundations for future co‑design work. We aim to continue this partnership into 2026–27 to embed public insight at the very start of the design process.