Background: Patients awaiting kidney transplantation need to be prepared ahead of the upcoming transplantation by developing targeted pre-and post-transplant knowledge. On this background, we designed a new health literacy intervention, including a film and a counselling session, based on motivational interviewing for dialysis patients provided by dialysis nurses.Aim: To explore patients' and nurses' experiences of the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention, focusing on the patient as a prepared knowledge actor.Design: An explorative qualitative study.Participants and Methods: Data included in-depth interviews with nine patients and three nurses who participated in the intervention. The interviews were audiotaped and analysed following Kvale and Brinkmann's method for thematic data analysis.Findings: Three main themes were identified: a different kind of health intervention stimulating new insight; a challenging kind of health conversation and changed relationships and increased security.

In this introductory essay, we will present a translational medical humanities approach where the humanities are not only an auxiliary to medical science and practice, but also an interdisciplinary space where both medicine and the humanities mutually challenge and inform each other. First, we explore how medicine’s attempt to tackle the nature–culture divide is emblematically expressed in the concept and practice of knowledge translation (hereinafter KT). Second, we compare and contrast KT as an epistemic ideology and a socio-medical practice, with concepts and practices of translation developed in the human sciences. In particular, we emphasise Derrida’s understanding of translation as inherent in all meaning making, as a fundamentally textual process and as a process necessarily creating difference rather than semantic equivalence. Finally, we analyse a case from clinical medicine showing how a more refined notion of translation can enlighten the interaction between biomedical and cultural factors. Such a translational medical humanities approach also requires a rethinking of the concept of evidence in medicine.