PIF TICK, explained: what the quality mark means for patient information

If you produce information for patients, you have probably seen a small tick logo on a leaflet or web page and wondered what stands behind it. This is a neutral explainer of the PIF TICK — what the scheme is, who runs it, what it certifies, and how the way you structure and source information relates to the quality it represents.

What the PIF TICK is

The PIF TICK is the only independently-assessed quality mark for print and digital health information in the UK. It is run by the Patient Information Forum (PIF), a long-standing membership organisation for people who produce health information, and it launched in May 2020. The mark exists to help patients and the public tell trustworthy health information apart from the vast amount of unverified material online.

What it actually certifies — process, not just prose

This is the most commonly misunderstood point, so it is worth being precise. The PIF TICK does not certify that one particular sentence is correct. It assesses the production process an organisation uses to create and maintain its information, against ten key criteria developed with PIF’s membership. Certified organisations must show their information is evidence-based, current, and easy to use and understand — and that there is a process behind it, not just one well-written page.

In practice the criteria describe what a rigorous editorial process should be able to demonstrate:

• information based on reliable, up-to-date sources;
• a scheduled review, so content does not silently go stale;
• users involved in developing the information;
• reading level and accessibility actively considered;
• feedback that feeds back into revision.

The mark is renewed periodically, so it is a statement about how an organisation works, not a badge stuck on a finished document.

That distinction matters when you decide what a tick on someone else’s leaflet tells you — and it matters for describing your own certification status honestly.

Why structured, sourced, accessible information supports this kind of quality

You do not need to be pursuing certification for the thinking behind the PIF TICK to be useful. The criteria are, in effect, a description of what good patient information looks like when it is built properly rather than written once and forgotten. Three habits do most of the work — and, candidly, they are the principles we built Patient Compass around.

Every statement carries a source — or a named clinician’s signature. The strongest defence against out-of-date or unsupported information is a simple rule: nothing goes to a patient unless it is grounded in a named, current source, or published under a named clinician’s professional responsibility. That single rule addresses the evidence, review and accountability strands of quality at once.

Structural completeness is enforced, not hoped for. A recurring failure mode is the missing piece — the material risk left out, the recovery step nobody wrote down. Building information so the required elements must be present, rather than trusting each author to remember them, is a more reliable route to completeness than review after the fact. The aim is to prevent bad patient information by construction, not merely to improve it once written.

Accessibility is designed in from the start. A dual-track approach pairs a standard version with a genuine easy-read version of the same content. Add attention to reading age, clear structure, and content warnings before difficult material, and “technically accurate” information becomes something a frightened or neurodivergent patient can actually use.

The scheme’s reach is wide: the World Health Organization features the PIF TICK in its toolkit on tackling health misinformation, and the NHS, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and YouTube Health have used its criteria as the basis for their own self-assessed standards.

An honest word on who holds the mark

Because the PIF TICK is valuable, it must be described accurately, and it is easy to overstate. Certification belongs to a specific organisation and a specific assessed process — it is not something a software platform can confer on its customers, and a tool used to produce information is not the same as the information itself being certified.

Within the Patient Compass Suite the position is deliberately narrow and documented. The mark sits at the level of the GGOMed deployment — whose founder is a registered member of the Patient Information Forum — and it is shown only with an owner-approved disclaimer that makes its scope plain. The platform itself, and other tenants using it, make no PIF TICK claim of their own. We would rather under-claim and be precise than imply a certification that has not been earned — which is, in the end, the same standard the mark exists to protect.

The takeaway

The PIF TICK is a process quality mark, run by the Patient Information Forum, that tells patients an organisation produces health information in a rigorous, reviewable, accessible way. You can find the scheme and its criteria at pifonline.org.uk. Whether or not you pursue it, the underlying habits — sourced statements, enforced completeness, designed-in accessibility — are worth adopting on their own merits.

If you would like an objective, no-cost read on where one of your existing leaflets stands on readability, sourcing, and how far down the page the risks appear, the free Leaflet Stress Test is the quickest place to start. It stores nothing you paste.

Patient Compass Suite is a clinician-led surgical-pathway suite from GGO Systems. It is a delivery layer for information a clinical team has already approved — not a clinical system — and it holds no patient accounts, and no directly identifying patient information. Founder: Mr Giangiacomo Ollandini, FRCS (Eng), MD, MSc.