Speakers:
Jill Wund
Sue-Ann Chen
Jackie Goldschmidt
Charlotte Shyllon
Our only asset is people. In medical communications, we have almost no physical goods to sell, very little intellectual property to license, but in our various jobs and our collective role in the global healthcare system mean that we need to attract, retain and nurture excellent people. We also play a role in developing people who move on to pharma and other healthcare industries. With just over 30 years since the first recognized medical communications agencies began, we as industry have a maturing but still young and largely informal professional structure. As in other fields, our industry has structural inequalities, barriers to success for people for reasons including gender, race, educational background, physical health, mental health and many others. As a very visible example, medical communications is around 75% women and 25% men, yet we still sometimes see panels of men speaking to audiences mostly of women. But we are lucky to be working a field with incredible diversity of talented people, a global talent pool that is delivering well now and offers so much more in the future.
Our major biopharmaceutical company clients are investing in changing their own cultures, to promote diversity for ethical reasons but also to succeed as profit-driven corporations in a highly competitive sector. In advertising and other communications sectors that are have existed for longer than medical communications, diversity is championed as a contributing factor to creativity and relevance. What can we learn from these and other mature sectors?
Relevance can also be helped through representativity -- can we bring more diverse people into the research base underlying their medicines, can we bring more diverse stories through our communications? Impact also comes from access -- our audience has to read what we've written, but not everyone is able to, and patients, policymakers, even healthcare practitioners do not have equal access to the science. Through open access, plain language summaries and other important innovations in transparency and accessibility, we are making headway in bringing evidence to a broader, more equal audience. What more should we do?
Medical communications is often a stressful industry, with pressures including quality, deadlines and financial return. We need to change our culture. What can we do to support a wider variety of cultural, physical and mental types in our industry, to make the most of the diversity and support people with issues affecting equity through not just points of selection or points of crisis but their entire careers in medical communications?
Learning objectives:
Jill Wund
Sue-Ann Chen
Jackie Goldschmidt
Charlotte Shyllon
Our only asset is people. In medical communications, we have almost no physical goods to sell, very little intellectual property to license, but in our various jobs and our collective role in the global healthcare system mean that we need to attract, retain and nurture excellent people. We also play a role in developing people who move on to pharma and other healthcare industries. With just over 30 years since the first recognized medical communications agencies began, we as industry have a maturing but still young and largely informal professional structure. As in other fields, our industry has structural inequalities, barriers to success for people for reasons including gender, race, educational background, physical health, mental health and many others. As a very visible example, medical communications is around 75% women and 25% men, yet we still sometimes see panels of men speaking to audiences mostly of women. But we are lucky to be working a field with incredible diversity of talented people, a global talent pool that is delivering well now and offers so much more in the future.
Our major biopharmaceutical company clients are investing in changing their own cultures, to promote diversity for ethical reasons but also to succeed as profit-driven corporations in a highly competitive sector. In advertising and other communications sectors that are have existed for longer than medical communications, diversity is championed as a contributing factor to creativity and relevance. What can we learn from these and other mature sectors?
Relevance can also be helped through representativity -- can we bring more diverse people into the research base underlying their medicines, can we bring more diverse stories through our communications? Impact also comes from access -- our audience has to read what we've written, but not everyone is able to, and patients, policymakers, even healthcare practitioners do not have equal access to the science. Through open access, plain language summaries and other important innovations in transparency and accessibility, we are making headway in bringing evidence to a broader, more equal audience. What more should we do?
Medical communications is often a stressful industry, with pressures including quality, deadlines and financial return. We need to change our culture. What can we do to support a wider variety of cultural, physical and mental types in our industry, to make the most of the diversity and support people with issues affecting equity through not just points of selection or points of crisis but their entire careers in medical communications?
Learning objectives:
- Understand the business case as well as ethical case for equity in our industry
- Be motivated to advocate for more inclusive clinical trials and medical evidence generation
- Feel empowered to actively contribute to more representative medical communications
- Know some of the drivers and barriers for equity of access to academic information
- Understand some of the opportunities as well as the challenges of employing people of very varied background and physical and mental health status
You can access this item by buying entire section
Buy entire section: