Medical communications and education

A reader chooses here by the communication with healthcare professionals the work serves: medical affairs and agency work in general, medicines information, curated research summaries, professional education, scientific meetings, consensus statements, and promotion and its rules. It leaves the journal publications a programme plans to publications, material written for patients and the public to patient and public communication, the value case argued to payers to market access and health technology assessment, the slides and posters a meeting is built from to slides, posters and talks, courses a writer teaches to other writers to teaching and training medical writers, and the agency as a career to choosing a specialism.

• The medical communications field and its agencies — the field without a settled definition, the work a medical communications role contains, what an agency sells, how it is organised and how it wins work, and the work inside the marketing mix
• Medical affairs writing — the in-house role between research and marketing as each company balances it, what the function is responsible for and why it has grown, the document range, the reader's own sources of information, and settling the reader and the key message
• Medicines information for healthcare professionals — establishing a healthcare professional's medicines enquiry, writing the answer, standard answers to recurring questions, answering an unsolicited off-label request, publishing for a readership, running an accountable service, and making the evidence usable at the pharmacy counter
• Curating and summarising new research for busy readers — selecting the literature and congress findings that matter and summarising them for time-pressed clinicians, or for patients: who curates and for whom, the deliverables, and the questions that tailor a summary to its reader
• Education and training for professionals — continuing medical education, training materials for a mixed-media programme, and examination and assessment materials
• Meeting documents — advisory board materials, meeting and symposium reports, and meeting minutes
• Consensus statements — what a consensus statement is, keeping it apart from a guideline, the writer's role from budget to publication, and where statements are produced
• Promotion and its rules — what a promotional campaign is made of, writing copy a reviewer will pass, the codes on promotion and dealings with health professionals, disclosing payments, and the national rules on medicine advertising in the UK and the US