3 Costly Reasons Easy Read Patient Letters for GP Practices Fail
askVERA · GP Practices
3 Costly Reasons Easy Read Patient Letters for GP Practices Fail
A patient can read every word of a letter and still have no idea what they are meant to do next.
More than seven million GP appointments in England are missed every year, and NHS England puts the cost of that at over £216 million. Work commitments, forgetting and transport problems explain most of it, according to a systematic review of missed general practice appointments published in the British Journal of General Practice. Comprehension barely features on that list.
But appointment letters are only one of the documents a surgery sends out. Referral letters, test result letters, repeat prescription notices and self-care instructions all carry a different risk: a patient who reads the letter in full and still cannot work out what it is asking of them.
Easy read patient letters for GP practices are aimed squarely at that second problem, the one the missed-appointment statistics were never built to capture.
A duty GP practices carry whether they have noticed it or not
The Accessible Information Standard has applied to every provider of NHS care since 2016, general practice included, under the Health and Social Care Act 2012. NHS England’s own guidance sets out what that means in practice: organisations must ask about communication needs, flag them on record, and then actually act on that flag, not simply note it and move on.
A GP practice that has never produced an easy read version of anything is not sitting in some grey area outside the standard. It is carrying a gap in a duty that has applied to it for close to a decade.
That duty is exactly what easy read patient letters for GP practices are meant to satisfy, not just the appointment reminder patients see most often but the fuller run of correspondence a surgery generates.
Practices are rarely being careless about this on purpose. Most simply have no practical route from “we know this patient needs a simpler letter” to actually producing one, inside a ten-minute consultation slot and a workload that leaves little room for redrafting correspondence by hand.
Three places easy read patient letters for GP practices break down
- The letter assumes clinical fluency the reader does not have. Terms such as “pre-operative assessment,” “annual review” or “medication reconciliation” are routine to practice staff and opaque to a patient with a learning disability, low literacy or early dementia, especially when no explanation sits alongside them.
- The instruction is buried, not stated. A letter that opens with three paragraphs of administrative context before reaching the one line that says what the patient must actually do loses readers well before that line arrives, particularly readers who already find long text tiring to process.
- The flag exists, but the template does not read it. A patient’s communication need might be recorded correctly in their notes, yet if the letter template used for repeat prescriptions or annual reviews cannot pull that flag automatically, the standard letter goes out regardless of what the record says.
None of these three failures require a single member of staff to have done anything wrong. They are simply what happens when a communication need is recorded as data but never connects to the document that actually reaches the patient.
Where askVERA fits into easy read patient letters for GP practices, and where it does not
askVERA converts appointment letters, referral correspondence and patient information leaflets into easy read or plain language drafts. A practice no longer has to choose which handful of documents get the accessible treatment and which do not.
A receptionist or practice manager uploads the source letter. The tool proposes a simplified version with supporting images, and a clinician confirms the medical content still says what the original said before it goes anywhere near a patient.
That confirmation step matters more here than in almost any other setting easy read gets used. A dosage instruction, a fasting requirement before a blood test, or a warning about when to seek urgent help cannot lose precision in the name of clarity.
askVERA speeds up the drafting. It does not remove, and should not remove, the clinical sign-off that decides whether a simplified letter still carries the same meaning as the one it replaced.
Practices do not need to convert every template in one go. A sensible starting point is the letters patients are most likely to act on wrongly if they misunderstand them: pre-appointment instructions, medication changes, and anything already flagged against a recorded communication need.
Get those three right, and the appointments that were going to be missed for reasons nobody could see on a spreadsheet start showing up in the numbers instead.
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