Literature Review: June 2026

Paper one is entitled, Who should decide what healthcare professionals need to know about laryngectomy? It's from Laura Jane Watson and colleagues and was published in Research Involvement and Engagement.

So this is a slightly different paper from the usual clinical trials and studies that we often discuss.

There isn't really an intervention versus control comparison here.

This is about co-design, specifically bringing together people living with a laryngectomy, family members, healthcare professionals, designers and a creative agency to help to try and create educational material.

I think the problem they're addressing here is important.

Following a total laryngectomy, we're completely altering somebody's airway.

They end up breathing permanently through their neck.

Their communication changes, swallowing can change, appearances change, and of course these are lifelong changes.

But specialist head and neck services are generally centralised, so that means when somebody goes home after a laryngectomy, the people providing healthcare may be community nurses, GPs, therapists, paramedics, or other professionals who see relatively few people with a laryngectomy.

Previous work from this group has looked at existing educational resources and they've found quite a lot of variation in content, delivery and evaluation and relatively limited patient involvement in designing them.

So these researchers this time went back to basics.

They brought together a patient and public involvement group, healthcare professionals including nurses, speech and language therapists, surgeons, people from the laryngectomy support groups, family members, a designer and this creative agency I mentioned before.

And they asked them what simple introductory resources should actually contain and what should they communicate.

What I particularly like here is the thought about how people with altered communication could participate in the co-design process itself.

For example, in the online meetings they adjusted the technology so that people using alternative communication methods weren't inadvertently cut off by sound suppression software.

This feels a little bit like a tiny detail but actually demonstrates the whole point of the project.

There's not much value in saying that the patient voice matters if the technology used in the virtual meeting room actually prevents that patient voice from being heard.

So the final resource was structured around six main areas.

Anatomy, communication, airway, eating and drinking, treating everybody as an individual, and then key messages.

But the interesting bit I thought was that people living with laryngectomy help determine the sequence and the emphasis of these resources.

And patients... communication.

If clinicians alone had designed the package, I'd imagine we'd have produced something anatomically perfect.

We might explain the stoma, the trachea, the voice prosthesis, swallowing and emergency algorithms, which are all of course very important, but the people actually living with the laryngectomy brought this very different perspective.

Understand how I breathe, understand how I communicate, give me time to communicate and don't assume that everybody with a laryngectomy is the same.

The authors themselves make the point that without that lived experience, the waiting and the key messages would probably have been very different.

Paper one is entitled, Who should decide what healthcare professionals need to know about laryngectomy? It's from Laura Jane Watson and colleagues and was published in Research Involvement and Engagement.

So this is a slightly different paper from the usual clinical trials and studies that we often discuss.

There isn't really an intervention versus control comparison here.

This is about co-design, specifically bringing together people living with a laryngectomy, family members, healthcare professionals, designers and a creative agency to help to try and create educational material.

I think the problem they're addressing here is important.

Following a total laryngectomy, we're completely altering somebody's airway.

They end up breathing permanently through their neck.

Their communication changes, swallowing can change, appearances change, and of course these are lifelong changes.

But specialist head and neck services are generally centralised, so that means when somebody goes home after a laryngectomy, the people providing healthcare may be community nurses, GPs, therapists, paramedics, or other professionals who see relatively few people with a laryngectomy.

Previous work from this group has looked at existing educational resources and they've found quite a lot of variation in content, delivery and evaluation and relatively limited patient involvement in designing them.

So these researchers this time went back to basics.

They brought together a patient and public involvement group, healthcare professionals including nurses, speech and language therapists, surgeons, people from the laryngectomy support groups, family members, a designer and this creative agency I mentioned before.

And they asked them what simple introductory resources should actually contain and what should they communicate.

What I particularly like here is the thought about how people with altered communication could participate in the co-design process itself.

For example, in the online meetings they adjusted the technology so that people using alternative communication methods weren't inadvertently cut off by sound suppression software.

This feels a little bit like a tiny detail but actually demonstrates the whole point of the project.

There's not much value in saying that the patient voice matters if the technology used in the virtual meeting room actually prevents that patient voice from being heard.

So the final resource was structured around six main areas.

Anatomy, communication, airway, eating and drinking, treating everybody as an individual, and then key messages.

But the interesting bit I thought was that people living with laryngectomy help determine the sequence and the emphasis of these resources.

And patients... communication.

If clinicians alone had designed the package, I'd imagine we'd have produced something anatomically perfect.

We might explain the stoma, the trachea, the voice prosthesis, swallowing and emergency algorithms, which are all of course very important, but the people actually living with the laryngectomy brought this very different perspective.

Understand how I breathe, understand how I communicate, give me time to communicate and don't assume that everybody with a laryngectomy is the same.

The authors themselves make the point that without that lived experience, the waiting and the key messages would probably have been very different.