Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Clinical Trials

Health is much more than numbers, medications, or a clinical diagnosis. A person’s health is affected by their environment and their lived experiences. 

How to Organize Medical Writing Projects

Welcome to the busy life of a medical communicator. Medical writers and editors are busy professionals who juggle multiple projects, teams, and tasks. 

How To Become a Medical Writer

Medical writers are key personnel in the health care and biomedical research fields. They communicate scientific research findings and information about diseases and treatments to a variety of audiences:  health care professionals, regulatory authorities, sales representatives, patients, caregivers, and more. 

Medical writers make scientific information accessible for readers and empower people to make informed decisions about their health.

Creating Sound Clinical Consensus Statements

Clinical consensus statements and clinical practice guidelines are among the documents used to ensure that patients are receiving the best care possible and that clinical decisions reflect the opinions of the experts who are invested in excellent clinical outcomes.

In other words, consensus statements are created when experts provide guidance for medical issues, even when the evidence is still being gathered, whereas clinical practice guidelines are developed based on high-level evidence.

Understanding Authorship in a Changing World

AMWA acknowledges the contributions of Crystal Herron PHD, ELS, as lead content developer, and Michelle Sauer Gehring PHD, ELS, for peer review, in the development of this AMWA resource.

As the world moves in a more interconnected, digital, and collaborative direction, best practices in authorship have become less straightforward. 

Medical writers may find themselves contributing to manuscripts in many ways and might encounter problematic examples of ghost authorship, gift authorship, and guest authorship.

Furthering the Public’s Understanding of Science with Plain Language Summaries

In recent years, medical communicators have been creating documents called plain language summaries (PLS) to help patients, caregivers, and the general public to better understand the latest scientific findings and clinical trial results. 

The terms plain language summaries (PLS), plain language summaries (PLS) for clinical trials, plain language summaries for publication (PLSP), and plain language writing can be confusing — and are sometimes used interchangeably. Although each term has a different application, the documents share a single goal: to work toward inclusion and empowerment of nonexpert audiences.