In March we hosted a small roundtable in Cambridge with fourteen people: patients living with long-term conditions, community pharmacists, two GPs and three researchers.
The clearest message was about timing. People said information about side effects arrives either too early, buried in a leaflet at the point of collection, or too late, after something has already gone wrong.
The second was about language. Several participants described reading that a side effect was "uncommon" without any sense of what that meant in practice.
We are using what we heard to shape a plain-English medicines guide, which will be published in our health information section later this year.