Medical Writing Good Pharma Medical Communications

Volume 22, Issue 4 - Good Pharma

Medical Communications

Abstract

Meeting reports are an aspect of ‘medical’ and other technical writing that has had little discussion. The following might be of interest to medical writers asked to provide rapid, reliable, objective reports of various types of meeting.

The United Nations, its agencies (including the World Health Organization, WHO) and other international bodies, have over the past 70 years developed a sophisticated system for recording the proceedings of working groups, meetings, assemblies, and conferences. Until recently, the records were written by people who were in the meeting room; now, with the financial restrictions affecting all organisations, they are being written more and more often at home from sound files. The details of the procedure are as follows.

First, two kinds of record are produced. One is what are known as ‘summary records’, which are written by ‘précis-writers’ (described below). These summarize the intervention of each speaker in a few lines, unless a series of speakers simply agreed with another one, in which case, the text would read, ‘The delegate of Germany, supported by those of Algeria, Bhutan and Cambodia, said….’ For a 3-h meeting, a summary record might be 20 pages or more. The other kind of record is a report, in which the gist of the debate on each topic discussed is summarised, usually without mentioning the names of either delegates or countries, unless this is specifically requested. A report of a 3-h meeting would be no more than 7–10 pages.

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Editor-in-Chief

Raquel Billiones

Co-Editors

Evguenia Alechine

Jonathan Pitt

Managing Editor

Victoria White

Associate Editors

Anuradha Alahari

Jennifer Bell

Nicole Bezuidenhout

Claire Chang

Barbara Grossman

Sarah Milner

John Plant

Sampoorna Rappaz

Amy Whereat

Section Editors

Daniela Kamir

AI/Automation

Jennifer Bell

Biotechnology

Nicole Bezuidenhout 

Digital Communication

Somsuvro Basu

EMWA News 

Ana Sofia Correia 

Gained in Translation

Ivana Turek

Getting Your Foot in the Door

Wendy Kingdom / Amy Whereat

Good Writing Practice

Alison McIntosh 

In the Bookstores

Maria Kołtowska-Häggström

Lingua Franca and Beyond

Maddy Dyer

Publications

Lisa Chamberlain-James

Medical Communications/Writing for Patients

Payal Bhatia

Medical Devices

Evguenia Alechine

My First Medical Writing

Anuradha Alahari

News from the EMA

Adriana Rocha

Out on Our Own

Tiziana von Bruchhausen

Pharmacovigilance

Clare ChangZuo Yen Lee 

Regulatory Matters

Sam Hamilton

Regulatory Public Disclosure

Claire Gudex

Teaching Medical Writing

Louisa Ludwig-Begall / Sarah Kabani

The Crofter: Sustainable Communications

Louisa Marcombes

Veterinary Writing

Editors Emeritus

Elise Langdon-Neuner

Phil Leventhal

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Chris Monk