Dickinson, a former editor of "Health Which?" magazine, said that by and large the "health industry" communicates very poorly with its consumers, and his presentation looked at examples of this and discussed the possible reasons for it. The dangers inherent in poor health communications are obvious and could be life-threatening. People who don't understand the correct dosage for their medicine may put their health at risk by taking too much or too little, or by ignoring adverse side effects.

Dickinson noted that the pharmaceuticals industry is very highly regulated, and that companies are under a legal obligation to provide information to the public which is "clear and understandable". Despite this requirement, many medicine package information leaflets use highly technical medical jargon to describe the chemical content of the medicine, and are written in a deliberately depersonalised style using abstract concepts and making use of the passive voice. He showed examples of poorly designed medicine leaflets and also poorly designed letters and pamphlets from hospital departments and NHS Trusts. He also showed a video of health service consumers - he prefers that term to "patients", which may imply suffering - discussing their difficulties with reading and understanding medicine package leaflets.

Dickinson claimed that it was difficult for many people involved in the provision of health services to accept that members of the public who did not share their technical or medical expertise were nevertheless competent to manage their own healthcare. They were denied the chance to do so because the information provided for them was in many cases so poorly prepared. He went on to suggest that the relationship between medical professionals and the people they treat was still based on ideas of deference and status which have largely disappeared in other areas of social discourse. This meant that people were not used to asking their doctors for more information about their treatment.

In response to questions from the audience Dickinson agreed that it was highly unlikely that health professionals and pharmaceutical companies were deliberately setting out to treat the consumers of health care in a derogatory way, or that the professionals felt that members of the public should "know their place". It was far more likely that the root cause of poor quality documents was simply ignorance of communications best practices, which is why information design professionals - and for that matter, technical communicators - have an opportunity to make a difference. Dickinson conluded his presentation with an example designed by his agency of a patient information leaflet that showed clearly what the medicine was, what it is used for, when not to use it, and what possible side effects to look out for. Regretably, Dickinson's design has not yet been implemented by the company that commissioned it.

Another questioner raised the issue of the cost to the pharmaceutical industry of improving the quality of their consumer communications. They would, he argued, claim that better communications would mean an increase in expenditure and expect to pass on these costs to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Some audience members remarked that the added costs would hardly be noticed given the huge profits many pharmaceutical companies make. Others noted that this was another example of companies in all sorts of industries who were more than willing to devote huge budgets to pre-sales communications in the form of advertising and marketing campaigns, but would never spend more than the absolute minimum on post-sales communications, such as user guides, online help, or medicine package inserts.

This lively and interesting meeting was the first of a series that the IDA is presenting in the coming months. Details will be available on their web site . David Dickinson can be contacted at Consumation .