Episode 84 – Interview with medical writer and editor Dr Catherine Richards Golini

This week we were incredibly fortunate to speak with Dr Catherine Richards Golini in Switzerland. Catherine is a Healthcare Publications Editor at Karger Publishers, specializing in creating, developing, and editing resources for patients and HCPs. Holding a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Swansea University, and with published research on patient communication, she is also a skilled plain language writer and reviewer of plain language summaries and patient materials. With expertise in health discourse, medical communication,and patient communication, Catherine also brings a wealth of experience in educational course development and language assessment. She cofounded and served as director of EALTHY, the European teachers‘ association for medical and healthcare English, demonstrating her commitment to advancing medical language education.

You can follow Catherine and learn more about her work here:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherinerichards/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/karger-publishers/
• https://velocityofcontentpodcast.com/plain-language-summaries-go-beyond-language/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGWlf2RhM6k

Transcript

Jen (00:00:21)
Hello, everybody. I am thrilled to welcome you to another episode of Let’s Talk SciComm.
I’m Jen, and as ever, I am joined by my excellent friend and colleague, Michael. Hi, Michael.

Michael (00:00:34)
Hey Jen. Very excited for today’s episode. And you know it’s always going to be a special one when our guest is in a different time zone and has gotten up very early to come and chat to us, so…

Jen (00:00:48)
Yes, we always feel humbled when people get up early and join before work to chat with us. So today, we are gonna be joined by Dr. Catherine Richards Golini, who is working in an area that we really haven’t spoken about very much on this podcast yet, Michael.
So Catherine works as a healthcare publications editor with Swiss-based Karger Publishers.
Now, she originally studied English literature and art history, which always intrigues me, before then working as a teacher for many years. But then she became interested in this whole phenomenon and world of medical communication.
And she has a PhD in applied linguistics from Swansea University, which was focused
on written medical resources in radiology, which is immediately fascinating to me.
And so now she’s been working as a writer and editor for many years. She’s a world-renowned expert in plain language and reviews plain language summaries and other medical communication for a whole lot of people and organizations and journals.
And of real interest and relevance to us Michael is that she’s very committed to medical education, to patient engagement.
And I think it’s fair to say ensuring that patients in the medical system are treated with respect and are given the information that they need in an accessible and understandable and inclusive way, which strikes me as utterly essential.
So welcome Catherine, we’re really thrilled that you’ve made time to speak with us today, all the way from Switzerland.

Catherine (00:02:24)
Thank you very much for having me and thank you for that lovely introduction. I always listen to people introducing me and think, Ooh, that person sounded… Goodness, that’s me. Goodness, do I do that? Yeah well, yeah. Thank you very much for that nice introduction.

Jen (00:02:39)
So Catherine, it really strikes me, I’ve been thinking a lot about your job because it’s not a job that I’ve ever thought about and it really strikes me that when someone is in need of medical care, both for the person themselves and for the family. You know, they’re really at their most vulnerable.
It might be the scariest, most difficult, most stressful experience that they’ve ever had. And you know, that’s why communication is so important. It has to be clear, it has to be plain, it has to be easy to understand.
It has to be something that people can take in when they’re potentially you know, very upset, very stressed, very uncertain, feeling very unsafe.
And I just sort of wonder, is that real sense of compassion and care for people, is that what drew you away from literature and art history and teaching into medical communication?
Because your career doesn’t strike me as having been on a you know, on a straight trajectory.

Catherine (00:03:34)
I have to say Jen, you are extremely perceptive because the answer to that is yes, absolutely.
There was a, about 15 years where I was teaching medical English. And I was living in Europe and then I did a master’s in applied linguistics. Again, language analysis, teaching language.
So I got the opportunity in Switzerland to teach. Initially it was radiographers and then it was nurses and biomedical analysts, et cetera.
To teach them (a) how to communicate with patients and (b) how to understand the research that was coming out to particularly the biomedical analysts.
And it was from there, yeah, that I started to think more and more about how we speak to patients.
Because I have to say, my students weren’t very good at speaking to patients and it wasn’t because of their choice of words, it was their attitude, generally.

Jen (00:04:23)
Interesting.

Catherine (00:04:24)
So yes, that was the spark. And I have a real passion for this now because of course, that was just an initial feeling. Now I have a lot more knowledge.
And yeah, it’s a fascinating area, often misunderstood. Some people believe all we need to do is speak slowly and patients will understand.
But there are so many different things going on here and you’ve touched upon many of them there, the emotion, the vulnerability, the fear.
How possible is it to take in information in those circumstances? How do people want the information? Do they have a right to the information? I believe they do. I believe it’s a fundamental right to have information about something that pertains to us and our health and our bodies.

Michael (00:05:07)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah and I guess, you know, a lot of what you’re speaking about really resonates with us because we teach students about how to be more effective communicators to communicate their science to the public.
And we often talk about how it’s important to assume that your audience is highly intelligent, they just haven’t had the time to dedicate to you know, understanding the particular topic that you’ve had the time to dedicate to understanding.
And I, from listening to you, I’m hearing that it’s you know, it sounds very similar when communicating with patients, that you know, it’s not just about speaking slowly, it’s about really being able to understand the patient and their particular needs and really trying to put yourself in their shoes.
And I know that one of the things that you’re involved with is patient advocacy groups or patient focus groups. And I can imagine that that’s a you know, a really useful tool to try and understand you know, where is the patient coming from and to understand what is needed then to have really effective medical communication.
I’d love you to touch on that for a moment. What can you learn from patients from talking to them that informs how you communicate with them?

Catherine (00:06:27)
Yeah, yeah. Yes, you’re right. A lot of the work I do when I’m writing the patient booklets for Karger is working with the patient groups.
And it’s an absolute privilege to be able to speak to people who have, in some cases, they haven’t come through their illness, they’re still in it, but they want to give back to people like themselves, fellow patients.
They want to speak up for fellow patients because there’s clearly gaps and things not working well. Advocacy is about speaking up for people, isn’t it?
And what I learn time and time again, irrespective of the pathology, irrespective of who I’m talking to, is that most people did not feel that they had the information they needed when they were first diagnosed.
Or the way that they were diagnosed left them in such a state of shock that they were mute for the best part of six months. And they could never understand what to say or what was going on.
And it took quite a while for them to gather their thoughts, to understand what questions to ask. The lack of information, the confusion…
Some people have very positive stories, but most people say they did not get the information they needed during their treatment or at the time of diagnosis. And they were left to their own devices to go and find that information.
That’s… So there’s this absence of information. It’s not even poor information. It’s a complete absence of information in some cases.

Michael (00:07:59)
OK, yeah.

Jen (00:08:01)
Which is just awful considering that I would be pretty certain that anyone who has gone into practicing medicine in any form is there because they care about people and they wanna do the right thing by people and they are really compassionate.
And I’m sure it’s not deliberate to not be supporting patients in the way they need to be supported. Would that be a fair thing to say?

Catherine (00:08:21)
Yeah, I mean, I suspect that the demands of medicine, you know, the number of people that clinicians have to see in the eight hour slot or 10 hour slot in some cases, that’s partly the problem.
There are too many patients, not enough time. We often hear the phrase, the time-pressed clinician or the time-pressed healthcare professional. And I’m sure it’s absolutely true, absolutely.
But there is another problem, isn’t there? And you’ll know all about this, is that very often communication skills are not being taught in medical school or if they’re being taught, it’s somewhat perfunctory.

Jen (00:09:03)
Which really fascinates me because we were talking before we started recording about what Michael and I do and the fact that our job is training students across all scientific disciplines at our university how to be more effective communicators.
And I guess I just sort of naively thought that the reason that doesn’t exist very widely within science is just because sometimes people don’t perceive that jobs in science are gonna require or jobs in STEMM are gonna require communication skills.
But I would have thought it was very very clear to all concerned that if you want to work in medicine, the vast majority of jobs are gonna involve you needing to talk with patients.
And so I would just kind of think that communications training would be a fundamental part of medical training, but you’re saying that’s not really the case or at least not universally so.

Catherine (00:09:52)
No, no, and I think it’s considered a soft skill and we know the attitude to soft skills.
I think there’s also a question of the privileged position that knowledge has, right?
So that, you know, there are clinicians, are there not, whose knowledge puts them above the patient. The patient in their view is somebody who’s receiving. This is not an equal relationship.
There are clinicians who still think that. They’re receiving skills, knowledge in the form of treatment and care. They’re being told what to do. They’re being told what’s going to happen.
I think for some clinicians, the idea that a patient can actually share in that decision-making, the patient can ask questions, the patient needs to understand this is, it’s not something they’ve ever been taught and that they may even struggle with it.
I don’t, you know, they do a grand job. We don’t want to be dismissing clinicians. But the fact is if you can’t communicate what you’re going to do to the person sitting in front of you, I don’t think you’re doing a very good job.

Jen (00:10:50)
I was gonna say, when I first started to ask as a young academic, “Excuse me, but why don’t we teach communication skills to our science students?” The answer I got repeatedly from all sorts of different people was, “You don’t have to teach that stuff. They just pick it up by osmosis.” And it’s just a nonsensical proposition.
You know, we don’t pick up communication skills by osmosis.

Catherine (00:11:11)
Yeah, of course not.

Jen (00:11:12)
And I think traditionally, science and technology and medicine, they are elitist. They come from elitist backgrounds where to some extent, although it’s not explicit, it’s part of the story that yeah, you’re given this privileged knowledge and maybe you aren’t really taught how to share it with everyone else because you want to maintain your you know, perception of expertise.
And you know, I mean, we can talk about that privilege and that kind of elitism for a long time.
But yeah, it’s just so important. I just, my heart aches for someone… You know, and there could be language barriers.

Catherine (00:11:48)
Absolutely.

Jen (00:11:49)
There could be so many reasons why somebody is desperately needing the information that the clinician has, who no doubt is well-intentioned, but just extremely busy and maybe hasn’t had the training in order to be able to share that information effectively. It’s just sounds like a really potentially awful situation.

Catherine (00:12:03)
They have to learn a new vocabulary, I think, instead of which we’re often expecting the patients to learn medical vocabulary in a flash. Where I feel that you know, people interacting with patients need to learn the vocabulary, the lay vocabulary.
They need to be aware of health literacy. I mean, if you’re not aware of health literacy, you can’t recognize it in the person sitting in front of you.
You don’t know that this person maybe has low health literacy. There isn’t one size fits all for everybody sitting in front of you.
I often feel that we talk about patients as if those of us talking about patients have never been patients or never will be.

Michael (00:12:39)
Yeah.

Catherine (00:12:39)
That’s one thing that we have in common, including healthcare professionals.
They get to be patients sometimes as well. And members of their families get to be patients.
And we’re not all the same. We’ve got different levels of knowledge about medicine. More confidence to ask the questions, less confidence. So it needs to be an interactive process.
And as you say, it’s not through osmosis. You need to learn how to do this. You need to listen as well.

Michael (00:13:04)
Yeah, it’s really really fascinating. Picking up on that point of it needs to be an interactive process, you know, you said that patients really should be sharing in the decision-making and it should be kind of a two-way flow of information.
Is that really what is meant by patient-centric healthcare? Could you talk a little bit more about that?
I mean, you’ve kind of painted a bit of a stark picture of how things do happen, but what should we be striving towards? You know, is it about having a more you know, patient-centric healthcare system? How can we achieve that?
You know, if we’ve got listeners who are maybe healthcare professionals themselves or striving to become healthcare professionals. You know, what do they need to do to make sure that they are communicating effectively with patients and allowing them to share in the decision-making to avoid you know, some of those problems that you’ve just described?

Catherine (00:13:57)
Yeah, now I’m not a clinician, so I’m going to be quite cautious in how I answer that question. I don’t train clinicians and I’m not a clinician or a nurse or, nor would I ever want to be.
However, you’re absolutely right, Michael, that patient-centricity is what it’s all about. Patient-centric healthcare. There’s that lovely phrase patients use, “Nothing about us without us.” And I think that sums it up very nicely.
You know, if we’re talking about a procedure or treatment that’s perhaps going to last a year and involve six visits to the chemotherapy department, that patient is every bit as involved as the healthcare professionals who, if not more involved, of course, ’cause they’re there all the time.
That patient needs to be seen as a partner in this interaction. We talk a lot about compliance and adherence. There are problems, are there not, with people with lower health literacy, but also with perfectly adequate literacy, not adhering to treatment, not finishing the course of antibiotics, not doing what has been suggested by healthcare professionals.
I can’t help thinking if these people were more involved and had more of a comprehension and were allowed to feel that they were equal partners, that we would see a drop in these non-adherence issues.
People don’t generally deliberately not take their medication. People generally don’t deliberately ignore the advice of a doctor.
There’s an awful lot more going on there. Perhaps they haven’t understood it. Perhaps they have understood it, but they can’t possibly afford the kind of smoked salmon and olive oil Mediterranean diet which we hear about all the time.
And it [always]… It does make me laugh, but in a kind of sad way. If your, you know, how many people can afford olive oil and smoked salmon?
They’ve been diagnosed with cancer and they’ve been told to go off, here’s the Mediterranean diet. And it’s full of things they never eat.
How helpful is that?

Jen (00:15:54)
Not…

Catherine (00:15:55)
It’s not helpful at all. It’s not helpful at all. And so it even comes down to the kind of nutrition advice that people are being given.
It comes down to really stopping and thinking, who am I talking to? Is this one size fits all approach really suitable? And the answer is generally, No, it’s not.

Jen (00:16:12)
One of the things that’s coming across very clearly is that effective healthcare communication is nuanced. It’s complicated. It involves a lot of thought and potentially training and time.
But one of the basic kind of bedrocks of this stuff is not using language that either people can’t understand or that mean, you know, terms that mean something different to them.
And I know that this is an area you have a lot of experience and expertise in. And it’s something that we teach a lot.
You know, we talk a lot about jargon is only jargon if you’re using it for the wrong audience. And technical language can be appropriate sometimes, but we have to get better at recognising when it’s not appropriate.
And I know that you do a lot of reviewing of plain language summaries. You know, this is a big part of your expertise.
So, you know, for someone listening who is struggling to recognise that they’ve been trained to write in a very particular way, a formal way, very academic with a lot of technical language, you know, how did you learn to become a plain language expert?
And what’s your advice for people in STEMM who know they wanna move away from that, but they’ve never, you know, they haven’t had the training to do it differently.
And sometimes they’re dealing with this sense of impostorism that’s so rife in academia where they’re desperately trying to prove their knowledge and prove that they’ve read enough and prove that they know enough.
But then Michael and I come into class and say, “Yeah, but you gotta write it in a way that anyone can understand.” That you know, they find that really hard.

Catherine (00:17:36)
Yeah, unlearn it, unlearn it all. Absolutely. It’s very difficult to unlearn what you know.
And I think there is a, there’s this dreadful feeling that if you don’t use that term, then you’re not actually being completely correct.
This text is no longer correct because you’re using a different term, but that’s not exactly the same, is it? It’s this term that we want to use.
And I think you have to be, be prepared to be… You have to be tolerant, more tolerant to use less precise terms and to be accepting that we’re not looking for 100% accuracy when we’re writing plain language summaries.
What we’re trying to do is to allow the general public or the time-pressed healthcare professional, that generally is the general public or the patient, we’re giving them access to what is perhaps extremely important information for them that otherwise they wouldn’t be able to have access to.
Somebody was saying to me just this week, I had a booklet reviewed by a clinician who suggested that we didn’t use the term “mutation”.
Now, mutation is a word that people don’t like. But some people say, no, keep using it because that’s what the doctors are using.
If you go and you’re diagnosed with this hereditary condition, you’re gonna hear the word gene, you’re gonna hear the word genetic, and you’re very likely to hear the word mutation, so keep using it.
The clinician said, “We don’t use that term anymore”. It’s not the preferred term. The preferred term is variant. Now, when I put that to the patient group… Yeah, I thought, Okay, well, I’m not deciding that. I’m gonna put it to the patient group.
This is where the patients come in really useful ’cause I don’t have to make these decisions all the time. I can pass it back to the patient.
The patient group, I thought they’d say, “Yes, let’s go with that. Mutation’s such a horrible word.” But what the patient group said was “Well, that’s not completely correct, is it? They’re not the same thing.”

Jen (00:19:32)
Interesting.

Catherine (00:19:34)
And I thought, Ooh, so the patients can do it as well. The patients can get… I don’t know, it’s a tricky game. It’s a tricky game.
And I do sympathize with scientists who feel that they have knowledge and they want to impart truth. And using different words isn’t the truth.

Michael (00:19:54)
Yeah, I mean, it is a tricky game as you say. Because you want to be precise, but you also want as many people to understand what you’re communicating about as possible.
And I guess, you know, when it comes to patients, they’re gonna be at lots of different levels of I guess, understanding of medical terminology.
And I suppose if patients are also on a bit of a medical journey, perhaps, that’s also a bit of a journey of learning.
So how do you take that into account where you may have some patients who are, they’re naive, completely naive to terminology or information about this condition, and then you’ve got a whole range from that point to people who actually know quite a lot about this condition. So you’ve got a lot of variety there. How do you tackle that problem?

Catherine (00:20:44)
Well I think, and it’s a very good question, I think if you’re writing something, you always have a reader in mind. And if you don’t, you should.
I don’t think it’s possible to write for, for everybody. You have a reader in mind and you write to that reader.
And when we’re writing patient information, we have something called a reading age, I’m sure you’re familiar with.
And we… There are standards, aren’t there? There are international standards and best practice.
Certainly for our materials that come in booklet form, we know that they’re aimed at the patient who wants to know more. So this is a patient who’s a little further down the line in their patient journey and is wanting to learn more.
So that reading age is around the age of 13.
Now, we also produce information sheets and those information sheets are destined for people who’ve just been diagnosed or for people who don’t wanna know more or would struggle with anything a little bit more detailed.
So the reading age of those sheets is set at about 9 or 10.

Jen (00:21:42)
Interesting.

Catherine (00:21:44)
So that’s what I keep in my mind, who I’m writing for.
And you know, I always defend the reading ages. I say, “Well, you know, a 13 year old reads pretty well, actually”.

Jen (00:21:43)
I’ve got one in my household, and she’s a great reader.

Catherine (00:21:57)
Well, there you go. There you go.
And you know, if you’ve got medical terminology, you explain it. And of course, as you said earlier, you can’t avoid using medical terminology nor would I want to. This is about a learning process as well.
Patients want to learn. They don’t want to be kept out of this terminology. They want to be able to use it in their interactions with their healthcare team. So it is a teaching process as well.
And so yes, you make sure you define it and you explain it.

Jen (00:22:25)
It’s just that constant balance, isn’t it? Between not wanting to be condescending towards your audience, but equally not want to, not wanting to alienate anybody.
And I think anyone listening who’s never been involved in anything that talks about reading ages might be really shocked to hear that the ages that we’re striving for.
But go and Google it and read about whatever the relevant newspapers are in your local world and you’ll be surprised. Even newspapers that pitch themselves as being quite intellectual and quite, you know, for the highly discerning reader, they’re still writing at a level that you know, a 13, 14 year old can understand.
Because they know people are busy and distracted and just want to be able to understand the message quickly.

Catherine (00:23:08)
Absolutely. And a 14 year old, goodness me. We expect them to take exams at the age of 15 and all this stuff.
The idea that we’re you know, as we get older, we’re adding to our vocabulary considerably, adding in medical terms. Well, that’s nonsense. This is about syntax. This is about how to read, isn’t it?

Jen (00:23:28)
Absolutely.

Catherine (00:23:28)
It’s about how people read. It’s about reading skills and how words are structured. We don’t use what we call complex sentences. We don’t use long 25 word sentences full of relative pronouns because they’re more challenging for people to parse.
So we keep our sentences shorter and I’m always getting feedback on that from people who don’t know anything about this.
It might come back from the sponsor of the project or even the clinician who suggests that we add sentences together to make a nice long sentence. Not realizing of course that I’ve done that deliberately. My sentences are 13 words long for a reason.

Michael (00:24:02)
Yeah.

Jen (00:24:02)
Yeah, interesting. Is that the golden number, 13 words?

Catherine (00:24:10)
Yeah, I’ve said 13. I think it might be even 15 max.
I think there’s, you know, there are obviously… Sometimes a six word sentence is more appropriate than a 15 word sentence.
But that, you know, that’s the skill of writing, isn’t it? And you have to be able to know when to stop or when to extend the sentence.

Jen (00:24:30)
So Catherine, we do a lot of teaching writing. It’s a very big part of our job, teaching our students writing skills.
And we go right back to basics. You know, what is a sentence?

Catherine (00:24:39)
Ahh, yes.

Jen (00:24:39)
How do you structure sentences so they’re clear?
And one of the challenges for us right now, today, is the fact that we’re seeing suddenly a massive change in the AI tools that are available to our students because students are using ChatGPT and other generative language models in all sorts of interesting ways, many of them completely legitimate ways.
But, you know, the challenge for us is we have to know that students are submitting their own work. We have to be assessing work we’re confident is theirs.
But at the same time, we want to prepare them for their futures working in industries where in many cases, using AI tools will not only be acceptable, but actually essential.
And so I’m interested in, in the world of healthcare publishing, is AI playing a big role? Is this something that’s helping you in your jobs? Or do you feel like it’s not good enough yet to be able to do what you need to do?

Catherine (00:25:29)
I do use AI. I’ve used it this week, actually. I wanted to, I was trying to think of an analogy for a child, of a fistula procedure, for a child who needs apheresis on a regular basis. A young child, age six or seven, very scary procedure.
And I wanted to come up with some kind of analogy where we could transmit what was happening, why it was being done. And for the life of me, it’s been a long time since I had a small child in the house, I couldn’t come up with anything.
So I asked ChatGPT to come up with an analogy. I explained the process, blah blah blah. And it came up with a couple of analogies, which I put to the patient group and they really liked one of them. And we’re going with that.
Now that’s a huge help. That’s a huge help. I even got it to generate some images as well to help the cartoonists sort of have, you know, see clearly what it is that we want.
So yeah, there are some great uses of it. I’ve used it to produce policy documents, et cetera, et cetera for work because whoa, is it quick. I haven’t got the kind of time to do that.
So there’s a lot of time-saving tasks that AI can do for us. It can’t write for patients yet.
I think it’s very good. If you ask it to do a plain language summary, it’s pretty good. And it’s getting better all the time, but it still needs that human to look at it.
I suppose what I’m thinking is that it won’t be long before it won’t even need the human to look at it.

Michael (00:27:00)
Well, yeah. I mean, the possibilities are very exciting around AI and I guess technology more broadly in bringing I guess, patients and you know, healthcare professionals kind of closer together on the same page, collaborating.
And maybe that’s part of the answer to you know, how we move towards this you know, patient-centric healthcare that we strive towards.

Catherine (00:27:27)
Yeah. I’ve heard there are clinicians who are using AI to help them communicate better.
There was a lovely article, and I think in the New York Times a year or so ago, clinicians who were already using, that was a year ago, ChatGPT-4 or whatever, or 3 it would have been then, to come up with a better way of replying to their patients.
And these might’ve been clinicians who were well aware that they found communication difficult and were well aware that AI could improve things for them. So yeah, there are many many positives.

Michael (00:28:00)
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Well, I’m just noticing the time here, Catherine. We’re having a fascinating chat and I feel like we could continue on indefinitely, but we are reaching the end of the podcast.
And before we finish, before we let you go, we would like to switch gears a little bit and we like to round out our interviews with some quick questions.

Michael (00:28:35)
The first question that I would like to ask you is, if you could pick an alternative job to what you’re doing today, what would it be?

Catherine (00:28:41)
A gardener, I think.

Michael (00:28:46)
OK.

Jen (00:28:46)
Oh, I love it, that’s an excellent answer.
Next question. If you could choose to have one superpower, what superpower would you choose?

Catherine (00:28:56)
I think the ability to climb up walls the way Superman… umm Spiderman did, that would be pretty cool.

Michael (00:29:03)
OK. Yeah.

Jen (00:29:03)
Oh, that would be fun. I thought you were gonna say the ability to read people’s minds because then you know, you could know the communication you’d need.

Catherine (00:29:04)
You were thinking of something better? No… That, no.

Catherine (00:29:10)
I think that would be a… There’s that wonderful film. No, I think that would be dreadful. To be able to read people’s minds? Ooh, my god. No, I wouldn’t want to know what you were thinking, I really wouldn’t.

Michael (00:29:16)
I know, it could be a bit of a burden.
I agree with you, it’d be very fun to be able to climb up walls like Superman.
You don’t need to be burdened with what’s going on in other people’s minds.

Catherine (00:29:27)
Yeah. Be more fun anyway, wouldn’t it?

Michael (00:29:27)
Oh yeah, definitely. All righty, if you could go back in time and give yourself a message at the age of 21 Catherine, what would you say to yourself?

Catherine (00:29:38)
“Have more faith in your abilities, girl.” That’s what I would say to myself at the age of 21.

Jen (00:29:46)
I love it. OK Catherine, if you had to pick just three words, what 3 words would you use to describe an effective communicator in a healthcare setting?

Catherine (00:29:56)
Empathetic. Aware. Clear.

Jen (00:30:01)
Beautiful 3 words.

Michael (00:30:04)
Excellent. And final question Catherine, what would your very top tip be for communicating in plain language, communicating effectively in plain language?

Catherine (00:30:14)
Think of somebody that you love, that you know is not going to understand your doctor. And write for them.

Jen (00:30:23)
Which is exactly what we you know, the kind of the real maximum of effective communication isn’t it?
Is know your audience, respect your audience, empathise with your audience, take the time and the care to think about the fact that they’re probably not like you.

Catherine (00:30:37)
Yeah, exactly.

Jen (00:30:39)
Well, Catherine, thank you so much for giving us your time this morning.
We know you have a really busy day ahead and it’s been [an] incredibly eye-opening conversation for us.
It’s so good to hear from someone with your experience and your expertise.
And I can imagine that Michael and I are gonna be talking about your work in class with our students in the future.
And although we don’t work with medical students, I think so much of what you’ve said is true for people working in all sorts of different disciplines.
So thank you for joining us today.

Catherine (00:31:08)
Well, thank you very much for talking to me.
I always like talking about these things with people who are equally passionate as I am.
So thank you.

Michael (00:31:16)
Thanks so much, Catherine.
It’s been a pleasure.

Jen (00:31:39)
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Let’s Talk SciComm from the University of Melbourne Science Communication Teaching Team. I’m Associate Professor Jen Martin and my brilliant cohost is Dr Michael Wheeler.

Michael (00:31:53)
And if you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode, we’d love you to share it with your friends and family. We’d love you to share your favourite episode online. And you can find us at LetsTalkSciComm on X, formerly known as Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Jen (00:32:08)
And this season, we are asking for your help to spread the word so that more people find out about our podcast.
So if you enjoy listening, we would love you to tell a friend, but we’d also love you to think about taking a couple of minutes to write us a review.
Whatever platform you listen on, there will be a place for you to leave a review. And we’re going to keep track and award our favourite reviewees some prizes.
We’re thinking about some merch. And we’d also love to reward our favourite review with a free science communication workshop that we will run for you in person or online, depending on whereabouts you are.

Michael (00:32:44)
Ooh, prizes. And if… They sound great. And if you’d like to get in touch to suggest a guest or a future topic, we’d love to hear from you. Please email us at lets.talk.scicomm@gmail.com. And as always, a huge thank you to our production team Stephanie Wong and Steven Tang.