Unclear, opaque and completely incomprehensible — the effect of jargon on public consultation

I’m no stranger to a rant about jargon in public documents and I’m always pleased when the issue receives wider attention than I can bring to it. And recently The Coventry Telegraph reported a senior councillor in the Midlands had levelled some serious criticisms at local health leaders’ Sustainability and Transformation Plan, branding the ‘jargon-filled’ report as ‘unclear, opaque’ and ‘completely incomprehensible to patients and the public’.

And while lots of councils and other public organisations use too much jargon, the NHS has a bigger problem than most. Open any public document about NHS service change and you’re likely to see more words like: reconfiguration, consolidation, co-locate, reprovide, sustainable, health outcome, super-ageing, co-produce… the list goes on.

We’re human. We communicate. We use and develop language to share information in ways that allow others to understand and act on it and complicated or specialist terms have their uses.

When any group of people come together they develop words and phrases that mean little outside the group. And that’s fine. We’ve all taken part in that process, whether it’s your family word for the TV remote, or shorthand terms you’ve adopted with colleagues at work to describe or name something you all know well.

Jargon: special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand.

Specialist terms only become jargon when a critical part of the intended audience doesn’t understand the words being used. Then it is an issue, holding power over its audience in the same way school children taunt classmates when they don’t understand a term that’s been used by someone in their social group.

The challenge for the NHS is bigger, because there are two separate sets of jargon. Our nurses, doctors and other staff have to use complicated medical terms just to do their jobs treating our illnesses and keeping us healthy every day. And service managers working in such a specialised and regulated environment have naturally developed terms that mean little to anyone not immersed in that world.

With meaningful public engagement on NHS service change plans a high priority for our politicians and accessible communication an important feature of equality law, it has never been more important to make sure everyone has an appropriate understanding of the issues you want to talk about.

I specialise in accessible communication and public involvement. Get in touch if you want to know more about getting communication right for your audiences.

Useful resources:
Government digital service: Writing for the web
Action on hearing loss: How to produce information for people with hearing loss