Access our support and expertise:
Medicines are one of the NHS’s biggest costs (£21.6 billion), but patients are often not given information they can easily understand to use them safely. Accessible medicines information remains a major and often overlooked gap.
This particularly affects people already at higher risk of poor access and outcomes, including those living in deprivation, people from ethnic minority communities, people with learning disabilities, deaf people, and those with limited English or low health literacy.
Across the Midlands (population ~10.8 million), this is a significant issue, especially in diverse cities like Birmingham and Leicester. Patients are often given information in formats they cannot read, hear, or use independently.
This can delay hospital discharge, increase reliance on support such as interpreters, reduce independence, and make it harder for patients to manage their medicines safely at home.
Written Medicine is a digital tool that helps healthcare professionals create accessible, personalised medicines information at the point of prescribing, dispensing, or discharge. It provides plain English instructions, translations, pictograms, audio, and QR-linked digital content so patients can understand and safely manage their medicines at home. It is designed to support, not replace, professional advice.
The solution is co-designed with patients. Content and pictograms have been developed with input from diverse groups, including children and young people with learning disabilities and people from ethnic minority communities. This ensures the information is clear, culturally appropriate, and practical to use.
The platform is evidence-based and tested in real-world settings. All language content is developed through a robust quality assurance process and is not AI-generated. Written Medicine integrates into existing care pathways and can be used across hospitals, community pharmacies, and primary care, with options to connect to EHR and pharmacy systems.
Implementing Written Medicine improves outcomes for patients, staff, and the wider NHS.
For patients and carers, it makes medicines information easier to understand, use, and revisit at home. This supports safer medicine use, greater confidence, more independence, and better self-management, especially for people needing reasonable adjustments due to language, learning disability, sensory, or communication needs.
For healthcare professionals, it improves communication about medicines and reduces time spent repeating or clarifying instructions, particularly at discharge or when treatments change. This supports safer care transitions, reduces delays where communication support is needed, and enables more personalised care.
For the wider NHS, benefits are both clinical and operational. Evidence shows improved understanding and safer medicine use. Financial modelling suggests strong return on investment through saved staff time, reduced interpreter costs, fewer medicines-related A&E visits, and reduced medicines waste. In one trust-level model, this equated to around £215k in avoided waste against £35.6k in implementation costs, giving an estimated net benefit of about £179k per year.
This supports NHS priorities around productivity, reasonable adjustments, self-management, and care closer to home.
For more information about Written Health on their website