We recently had the pleasure of talking to a member of our Advisory Panel, Lisa Chamberlain James. Lisa is a Senior Partner and CEO of Trilogy Writing & Consulting Ltd, a company that provides medical writing services for clients including pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organisations. In addition to this, Lisa is involved in a variety of organisations including the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) as a member of the Educational Committee, The Organisation for Professionals in Regulatory Affairs (TOPRA), PIPA (a life science AI company) and much more. You can read her thoughts on the impact of plain language resources on the patient treatment journey, the challenges facing the medical writing field and more below.

What does a typical day in your job look like?

It sounds like such a cliché, but there really is no ‘typical day’ – it’s one of the reasons I love my job so much! Among many other things, I could be working with client teams to kick off or continue a project, advising or guiding other writers in the company, running trainings or preparing new trainings/presentations for conferences or for the European or American Medical Writing Associations. Additionally, I could also be discussing aspects of our new AI tool with the TriloDocs team, reviewing a Plain Language Summary of Publication (PLSP) for Future Sciences Group, or talking to potential new clients about who we are and how we could help them.

Medical writing is a multidisciplinary field. Do you have any tips for succeeding in working across so many different therapeutic areas?

You’re right that medical writing requires a very extensive and unique skill set, but thankfully medical writers are not required to be subject matter experts in every therapeutic area! We need to understand enough science to be able to get to grips with a therapeutic area quickly, and to be able to ask the right questions of the clinical teams. However, our skills are mainly needed on the documentation side to ensure that the correct messages are delivered clearly, succinctly, and in a defensible and unbiased way. Of course, we are dealing with human beings in the teams, so we need a lot of interpersonal, management, organising, and communication skills too. Clinical development is an ever-moving beast that likes to throw curve balls and surprises along the way, so being able to pivot quickly, be flexible, and proactive is really important. A crystal ball never goes amiss either, but unfortunately they are usually in short supply!

How do you hope plain language resources might impact a patient’s treatment journey?

Writing in plain language has been a personal love of mine since I became a medical writer. Its importance really cannot be underestimated.  I’m delighted that all the hard work that patient advocacy and other groups have put into raising awareness and insisting on better information for patients is finally paying off with changes in regulatory legislation and increasing requirements for PLSPs. I think all of us working in this area have a fervent hope and a deep-set belief that if patients have access to high quality, trustworthy, understandable information about diseases and medicines, it will not only enable them to make better decisions about their own healthcare, but it will de-mystify treatments, medicines and clinical development, engender trust in the pharmaceutical industry, and increase adherence and compliance to treatment schedules. This can hopefully reduce the number of hospital admissions and poor outcomes caused solely by patients not understanding how to take their medicines correctly. This can only help everyone involved – including prescribers.

What do you consider to be the greatest challenges hindering the field of medical writing?

This is a big question with many possible answers! You may expect me to answer ‘AI’ – the current buzz word – but I genuinely see AI, if used correctly, to be an opportunity for medical writers rather than a challenge (we still need critical thinking and contextualisation from a human brain in clinical development and assessment). Therefore, I’m going to say that the greatest challenges are finding and training medical writers – we bring more to the table than just excellent writing; medical writers can add much more value than that in their forward thinking and crafting of documents and management of projects and teams. Plus, we need to raise awareness of the value of high quality medical writing, which is still under recognised in many companies (although not by Regulatory Authorities, as the recent work from the American Medical Writing Association has shown).

If you had unlimited resources, what work would you carry out and why?

I would do more of what I already do! I consider myself extremely fortunate to have a career that I love, that stretches me mentally (and often emotionally), working with amazingly talented people within and outside of my organisation, and which I really believe makes a difference to peoples’ lives. Who wouldn’t want to do more of that?