DIA Musings: How Medical Writers View Themselves

I sat in on several sessions during the DIA annual meeting that looked at roles, responsibilities, and skill sets of the medical writer. Not surprised by what I heard as descriptors for the above three points. Rather, I am disappointed by all the things I did not hear mentioned as descriptors. Like all of the items we describe as needed skills in our first post here on this blog: The Role of the Professional Writer in the World of Drug and Medical Device Research. Most striking is the absence of the term "knowledge manager" from any of these discussions. In a nutshell, the prevalent vision of a medical writer is: "the hard skill we engage in is the mechanical task of writing about data and everything else is a secondary soft skill." I suggest this is a rather myopic vision.

If you have read any of the blogs posted here, then you know Philip and I hold a significantly different vision of the requisite skill set, especially the hard skills needed to move down the continuum from data to information to knowledge. This thinking reminds me of how 18th century cottage craftsmen (men and women) viewed their work. They engaged in mechanical tasks to create something, be it a buggy whip, a pot, or a candle. They always thought of themselves in terms of the product they created, not in terms of what the user wanted to do with this product or in terms of the unique skills they used to manipulate simple materials into sophisticated tools. So the buggy whip makers never saw themselves as enablers of faster or more disciplined transportation. The buggy whip makers never saw themselves as practioners of a unique family of skills required to manipulate long plaited strips of leather into semi or very flexible instruments.

(By-the-way, I also find interesting parallels in the place of the work: the 18th century cottage for the craftsman and the 21st century home for many medical writers. More on these parallels some other time.)

Back to the main point here. One presentation was centered on the need to develop a validated writing instrument to test would-be medical writers, so that you can identify the "really good ones" from "all the rest." I am not sure that a writing test will ever come close to doing that. A writing test is only going to identify whether somebody can follow syntactical and lexical rules you hold as important, not whether somebody can consistently structure data so that it becomes meaningful information to the end-user or to assign theoretical or practical significance to information so that is becomes knowledge. Now give me a test that can measure these skills and we'll really have something.

Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog