Plain Language Summaries of Clinical Trial Results: A Preliminary Study to Assess Availability of Easy-to-Understand Summaries and Approaches to Improving Public Engagement

More patient and public involvement in healthcare research will help to speed the process of making new medicines. This is known by both the regulators and the healthcare industry. The healthcare industry wants to make more information on human research studies available to patients and the public. One way to help achieve this is to write simple summaries of clinical study results. Here, we use the term plain language summary (PLS) to describe them. The PLS allows people to understand human research studies more clearly. A new law will soon make it necessary to write a PLS for every clinical study done in Europe. But, today, is the PLS being used to inform the public about clinical research studies? And what is its potential? We found only  a few researchers have already begun to write PLSs. PLSs on most studies are not available to the public. Even those PLSs on public websites are very hard to find through a Google search. To better understand the potential of PLSs we are doing more research. This research will look at what the public wants to know about these studies and how they will retrieve this information.