When a patient leaves hospital, the leaflet in their hand is often the only part of the visit they can read again at 2am — what to watch for, when to come back, what happens next. How good that information is, and whether they get any at all, currently depends on which hospital they happened to attend. We think that's an inequality worth naming — and worth fixing.
Spoken advice is forgotten fast — anyone who has worked a night shift knows how much of a discharge conversation survives the journey home. Written information is the safety net: the red flags that mean come back, the care instructions, the follow-up plan. Every NHS trust writes its own leaflets, separately, to its own standard, on its own schedule. Some collections are excellent. The result of doing it two-hundred-odd times over is predictable: the same patient, with the same condition, goes home with very different information depending on the front door they walked through.
We've gathered more than 2,800 patient information leaflets from 5 NHS trusts — from the trusts' own public websites — and organised them so a clinician can find the right one in seconds, not at the bottom of an intranet at 3am.
The library is free to every clinician and every patient, and it always will be. No account, no login, no charge — a doctor or a patient never pays to see a leaflet.
The leaflet library tracks nothing about the people who use it — no cookies, no analytics, no identifiers. A patient reading about their diagnosis is nobody's data point.
You won't find a league table. We don't name trusts, and we won't — praising some and shaming others doesn't get a single extra leaflet into a patient's hand. The point is the gap, not the blame. And you won't find statistics yet: we're building the evidence base on how much information patients receive across trusts, and we'll publish numbers when they're solid and fair — not before. That's a promise about honesty, and it cuts both ways.
If you work in or with an NHS trust and care about the state of your patient-information estate — what you have, what's out of date, what's missing — we'd like to talk. Email hello@medrics.co.uk.