LONDON — Doctors have long been chided for their seemingly unintelligible handwriting. Now, they are being urged to drop the Latin.

In an effort to improve written communication with patients, an initiative unveiled this week by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges — which represents 250,000 doctors in Britain — is encouraging doctors to ditch confusing medical jargon and instead write to their patients directly in plain, simple English.

The project says with more than five million outpatient visits a month in England, outpatient clinic letters are “the most written letters” in Britain’s National Health Service.

Currently, the letters are sent to the patient’s general practitioner instead of the patient, meaning that doctors have to write about their patients instead of writing to them, which can cause barriers in communication.