We currently have internships available for bright and motivated individuals wanting to start a career in medical writing. You will be helping with a research project in medical writing, and seeing the day-to-day work in a medical writing company at first hand. All our recent interns have found full-time jobs in medical writing since doing internships at Dianthus Medical.

Hours and timing of internships are flexible. Please note that these are unpaid positions.

To apply, please send a CV and covering letter to internships at dianthus dot co dot uk. Your CV and covering letter should, between them, contain the words “turnip”, “frabjous”, and “codswallop”.

The final day of the conference began with a plenary lecture about the importance of compliance with promotional codes, such as that by the ABPI, when writing materials that could be used for promotional purposes.  One of the great challenges in this area is that codes are not harmonised across countries, so material that might be perfectly compliant in the UK might fall foul of the code in Germany, for example, or vice versa. Definitely an area with many pitfalls for the unwary.

After that, I gave my workshop on statistical analysis of binary data. The workshop went well, and I had an excellent set of delegates who asked many very intelligent questions. It was particularly satisfying that they seemed to grasp the basics very quickly, leaving time for tackling some of the more advanced topics in more depth. We even got into the mathematical details of why logistic regression produces its estimates of effects in the form of odds ratios, which is quite sophisticated stuff. I suspect I single-handedly doubled the number of medical writers on the entire planet who understand the maths behind that in one morning.

The conference finished at lunchtime on Saturday, so after my workshop, there was nothing more to do except have lunch, relax over a couple of beers, and come home.

All in all, it was a splendid week, in which I learnt much and had a great time catching up with all my wonderful colleagues in the medical writing world. I’m already thoroughly looking forward to the next EMWA conference, in Nice in November.

The day began at 8 am with a plenary lecture on knowledge and information management. Some good hints and tips there, especially for the knowledge management wiki that we’ve recently set up at Dianthus.

Then for the rest of the morning I sat in on Victoria Cairns’s workshop “statistical thinking for medical writers”. I’ll shortly be developing some new statistics workshops for EMWA, and I thought it would be useful to make sure we don’t overlap too much. I was pleased to see that Victoria gave a particularly thorough and comprehensive explanation of what confidence intervals were. Some of my workshops assume that participants are already familiar with such things, and now I know that I can confidently (no pun intended) suggest that anyone who isn’t totally comfortable with confidence intervals attends the statistical thinking workshop before coming to mine.

In the afternoon, I gave two short seminars, the first on XML for medical writers, and the second on CDISC. The CDISC seminar generated some lively discussion on the protocol representation model (which has been a recent subject of this blog), and it is clear that it is going to be of great interest to the medical writing community. I was lucky to have Art Gertel, who had been on the team that produced the model, attend the workshop, as he was able to add some invaluable perspective from a CDISC insider.

The seminars were followed almost straight away by an editorial board meeting for The Write Stuff (EMWA’s journal), which generated some interesting ideas for future issues. The one that I thought was most promising was a question and answer column. Readers can send in questions on any aspects of medical writing, and the TWS team will find an appropriate expert to answer them. I hope it takes off.

And then, with the serious business of the day over, it was time to join the guided walking tour, in which we got to see some lovely bits of Lisbon and learn a little more about the city, before an agreeable dinner of lovely fresh seafood with fado singers in the background.

The last day tomorrow, at which I shall present my workshop on statistical analysis of binary data. The conference seems to have gone very quickly this year.

The relatively quiet day has allowed me to write an article for the next issue of EMWA’s journal, The Write Stuff, for which the deadline is fast approaching. You should be able to read it when the next issue appears in June.

Off to the workshop leaders’ reception shortly, no doubt followed by a pleasant dinner in some good company. Tomorrow will be a lot busier.

It was my privilege to speak at the opening session of the conference last night in paying a brief tribute to Geoff Hall, a past president of EMWA and a good friend of mine, who sadly passed away last month after a long battle with prostate cancer. It is such a shame he couldn’t make it to the conference, as I know how much he loved both Lisbon and EMWA.

The conference today began with a fascinating talk about Web 2.0 in medical education, by Dr Anne Cunningham of the University of Sunderland. And now here am I blogging about it. How neat is that?

After that, I attended a workshop on pharmacogenomics, given by Andrea Palluch of Inpharmedia, which I found very interesting. It’s taught me a few useful things, probably the most important of which is what a hideously embryonic stage the discipline is still at. But definitely one to watch over the next 10 years or so. It will be wonderful if it lives up to its promise of ensuring that drugs are more tailored to the specific patients in whom they will work best, with the minimum of side effects.

This afternoon saw a fascinating talk by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz from BioMed Central (heroically standing in for Melissa Norton, who unfortunately had to pull out at the last minute owing to illness) about biomedical publishing in the internet age. It was my privilege to chair the session, although I suspect I was only given the job because no-one else wanted to introduce the speaker and attempt to pronounce his name correctly. It was a fascinating talk, and it’s clear that internet biomedical publishing can be far more than simply taking a conventional article and putting it on a website, although it is still early days and many of the possibilities are not yet being fully used. Something I suspect will turn out to be very important is the opportunity for raw data to be made available together with publications. This needs some careful thought, as there are a number of potential problems, not the least of which is persuading researchers to make their data publicly available. Journals could take the lead here, if they wanted to make it a condition of publishing, and Iain described some tentative first steps in that direction. I think this has great potential for good once the teething problems are ironed out.

Iain’s talk was followed by the EMWA AGM, which saw Helen Baldwin retire as president, to much grateful applause from the assembled company for all the sterling work she had put in during her tenure. She is succeeded by Laurence Auffret, who I’m sure will be more than capable of leading EMWA every bit as dynamically as Helen has done over the last year.

All that now remains of today is to head to the conference banquet. Back for more blogging tomorrow.

Adam will be presenting his workshop on statistical analysis of binary data, as well as short seminars on XML for medical writers and CDISC.

We’re just hoping that the ash cloud is a long way away and doesn’t mess up our travel plans.

A hearty welcome to the team to Ruth from all of us at Dianthus Medical.