Different types of editorial and non-editorial services are offered by medical and healthcare communications companies to their clients. Most of these clients are involved with the marketing of their products such as medicines, medical devices, health supplements, growth formulas etc.

All materials are developed as per the client requirements, and are mainly used as promotional tools for marketing campaigns of new medicines; devices etc, or simply to make the general public aware of a drug already available in the market. As obvious, these materials are prepared for a number of audiences such as the medical or healthcare professionals, patients or the general public.

Medical writers are an integral part of the pharmaceutical industry. Successful medical writers possess various key competencies such as flawless English language skills, flair for writing, ability to present medical data accurately, audience identification, commitment to quality, team skills, ability to meet deadlines etc.

Work Profiles:

Pharmaceutical industry, Contract Research Organisations (CRO’s) and communications agencies frequently hire medical writers in full time positions. They can also work as freelance medical writers and medical journalists. The nature of work of a medical writer varies from company to company. Those working with CRO’s and pharmaceutical companies are mainly involved with regulatory document preparation, while those who work with communication agencies are involved in preparing promotional and marketing related documents. Medical writers are involved in preparation of scientific documentation at all levels of drug development, and for this pharmaceutical companies have separate and well organized medical writing departments. Medical writers are also involved in consultancy services, for providing information on document templates, regulatory requirements, protocol information, branding & styling for the product, quality control, and presentation & marketing of the product. Medical writers in senior positions are often involved in handling additional responsibilities such as providing input in drug development programmes, trial designs, data analysis, product launch and marketing strategies.

Freelance medical writers often find themselves contracted by sponsors for writing clinical trial reports (CTR) also known as clinical study reports (CSR) even before all the required documentation is ready at the sponsors end. This causes delays in the completion of the clinical study report. In addition, delayed CTR completion can extend the actual submission date of the product’s eCTD/marketing application as clinical study reports are mandatory documents for the regulatory submission dossier. Every day by which the marketing application submission gets delayed, results in a considerable loss of revenue for the sponsor.

Completion of the clinical study report must be taken on a priority after study completion and all efforts must be put in to ensure that a clinical study report is finalized within a reasonable amount of time. This will not only reduce the cost of CSR development but also result in faster submission to the regulatory authorities.

We have discussed about about medical writers being put through a written test during medical writing interviews in many earlier posts. Here is a sample medical writing interview written test that you may be asked to do. Do not prepare this question only, rather look at it as a guide and practice many similar tests.

Downloading various free full-text scientific articles from PubMed or Science Direct and trying to rewrite them in your own way as per different referencing styles could be another exercise you could do to prepare for a medical writing written test. We have already discussed about various referencing styles in an earlier post.

DOWNLOAD THE Medical Writing Interview Sample Written Test HERE

We live in an ever changing world that is fast-paced, technologically advanced, interconnected with almost no communication barriers. A wealth of information is thrown at us everyday by newspapers, magazines, websites, emails, sms, phone calls, social networking and what not, but all of us know that it is impossible to remember and act on all the information that we receive and process. So what do we as human beings do about it? How do we react to this? As more and more information flows to us, we become more and more selective. No one has time to read through pages of documents or read lengthy articles on the internet. We only scan through the information, look for the most important points or the highlights and move on!

With people moving from one piece of information to the next so rapidly, it is very difficult to get your message through in the most efficient manner. This is especially a challenge when the message is technical and the audience multi-lingual and multi-generational.

Referencing is an essential part of any scientific document. A referencing style is a specific format for presenting your in-text references (footnotes or endnotes), and bibliography. There are many different referencing styles.

Use of referencing:

When a writer puts together a written report or when a speaker delivers a lecture, they are essentially presenting consolidated data and information obtained from a number of sources such as results from clinical trials, surveys etc. All these sources (articles published in scientific journals, statistics reported on healthcare websites etc) which are used by the writer or speaker are presented towards the end of the document or the bottom of each presentation slide.

In the previous post we discussed about how to prepare for and attend events from a medical writer point of view. Let us now, in a greater detail discuss about how an event highlights, also known as meeting highlights should be written.

Before we discuss how to write event highlights, let us look at its definition:

An event highlights is a summary of a presentation, talk, or lecture, containing text and visuals (such as graphs, charts or tables) illustrating complicated medical information in a simpler format.

Although on most occasions this type of writing is semi-promotional in nature and is used by clients to promote their products, it is the medical writer’s responsibility to make it informative for the audience. You must look up some good samples written in the past by your colleagues before getting started.

As a medical writer working in a pharmaceutical company or a contract research organisation most of the times your job responsibilities are not limited to writing. In fact in senior medical writer positions you function both as a writer and a project manager being responsible for completion of projects on time. On many occasions medical writers are required to attend events such as new product launch, lectures by eminent personalities, conferences, seminars etc so that an event summary (highlights) can be written to be made available to people not present at the event or for publication in any of the company newsletters, newspapers, magazines, journals etc.

Before you attend any such events, it is important that you prepare well, know in advance how to carry yourself and what points to make a note of during the event. Your company may already have a standard operating procedure (SOP) related to attending events, so if your company has one, read it thoroughly. If you are new to the company, it will act as a guide for you to do things right as per the expectation of your line manager or seniors.

Most writer’s at some point in their lives face a writer’s block which is a loss of the ability to produce any new work. Instead of feeling energized and excited about getting started on a new assignment, the writer’s find themselves to be stressed, apprehensive and demotivated. Such adverse feelings make it difficult to get started, resulting in a writer’s block. The intensity of the condition varies from temporary to extreme. While temporary writer’s block in which the writer’s are unable to get started on one particular assignment is most common, extreme conditions may prevent them from writing for years and may even result in many of them giving up a career as a writer.

The Oxford dictionary defines the word hedge as, ‘a fence or boundary formed by closely growing bushes or shrubs’. In writing, hedging refers to the use of cautious language to make noncommittal, cautious or vague statements. It allows authors to make decisions about their viewpoint on a particular subject or the strength of the claims that they are making.

In addition to several other reasons, hedging leaves open the option of retreat for the writer if required. In scientific writing this technique is used by writers to differentiate between ‘claims’ and ‘facts’, to safeguard themselves from chances of error and to report the limits of their findings. Although hedging is legitimate and commonly practised in scientific writing, it is important for writers to be aware of their hedges and to avoid using them in excess.