Please, Write to Me: Guidance for writing directly to patients (Academy of Royal Medical Colleges, February 2026)

Summary

The 'Please, Write to Me' guidance from the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges provides information and advice to encourage and support healthcare professionals to communicate directly with patients in writing. 

This guidance was first published in 2018. As a result, many clinicians began writing directly to patients in plain English following outpatient clinic consultations. This has since been recommended as best practice by professional and NHS bodies, the General Medial Council, and the UK Government. This update extends the guidance to include writing a section of discharge summaries directly to patients following a hospital admission.

This guidance and governance safeguards should also be applied when developing and using AI systems to create clinical documents for use in training and practice.