Dianthus Medical Limited

Perhaps you are considering using a freelance medical writer for your medical writing projects? There are certainly some very good freelancers out there, but before you decide to use one, ask yourself the following:

• What happens if your freelancer is ill or goes on holiday? At Dianthus, we have the backup to ensure your project can still progress through any staff absences.
• Do you need to use many different freelancers to complete your project? Our team can take on larger projects and offer a seamless service: in particular, we can offer a complete data analysis service for clinical trials, from a pile of case report forms to a complete study report.
• How does your freelancer manage quality control? In our experience, review of documents by a second person is much more effective than when a writer has to be responsible for his or her own QC. All documents at Dianthus are reviewed by someone other than the person who wrote it before being sent to the client.
• When is your freelancer next available? The good freelancers (and let’s face it, you wouldn’t want to use the other sort, would you?) can often be booked up several weeks or even months in advance. The size of our team means that we can usually juggle work around to fit in urgent projects at short notice.
• For regulatory writing (eg clinical study reports), are you confident that your freelancer is working in a GCP-compliant environment? Having the necessary SOPs and other quality measures to produce regulatory writing to GCP standards is not easy for a freelancer to achieve. Our regulatory writing is done to SOPs in a GCP-compliant environment.
• What does your freelancer do when faced with a tricky problem beyond his or her expertise? The broad range of expertise within our team means that our writers can usually solve any problems by discussion with a colleague: in particular, any tricky statistical problems (very common in medical writing!) can be resolved by speaking to one of Dianthus’s statisticians.