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Creating communication magic, without tricks Successful healthcare communications need to bring their audience on the journey as a willing and cognisant partner I was recently reading an interesting article published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which was also picked up by the mainstream media. The topic was Mind Control Tricks: Magician’s Forcing and Free Will. Like most people I am enthralled and often baffled by magicians, both in close-up settings and on the stage. Magic makes great ...

Sunday 25 April is World Malaria Day Continuing the fight against malaria in a global pandemic Sunday 25 April is World Malaria Day – a day when we have the opportunity to thank all health workers, researchers, malaria control programmes and organisations fighting against the disease. Malaria remains a leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa. Every year, the vector-borne disease kills an estimated half a million people worldwide. In the past decade, there have been significant efforts to...

Adding insult to injury Hey Europe, it may be time to consider that ‘less is more’ The middle of March was a particularly bad time for Europeans, and that’s saying something since the last fourteen months have seen wave after wave of gut-wrenching health news and dire economic statistics. Certainly, some of the bad news has to do with the fact that case loads of COVID-19 are rising, and countries are once again going into lockdown. Without doubt, the vicious rise and spread of troubling ...

Making social sexy We’ve all been there. Fingertips poised over the keyboard ready to ask Dr Google that burning question we’re too embarrassed to ask an actual healthcare professional about. Even those of us in ‘the industry’ get sucked into clickbait and led down dodgy digital rabbit holes full of misinformation that only makes things worse. We leave feeling confused, worried and sometimes poorer, having spent £50 on a miracle cure made of hemp oil and cranberries. But we do it time ...

Darwins Medicine blog Professor Brian D Smith is an authority on the pharmaceutical industry and works at SDA Bocconi University and Hertfordshire Business School. Edging towards success Evolution tells us to look for small advantages, not big leaps In an online Masterclass recently, I was asked what I thought was the biggest single lesson that biomedical companies could learn from biological evolution. That’s a hard question, because it forces me to choose from many really important learnin...

Pandemics for dummies Where to begin? The mistakes started with the ignoring of the warnings that the virus was coming to our part of the world. And then there was the mask confusion. You don’t need one. Actually one might help. OK, they definitely help and should be mandatory. The testing and the contact tracing was also a disaster. Not only in its conception, but also in its execution. Drive-through centres in every parking lot and phone-based apps that would inform us if we had been expos...

HCA releases new PR media guide The guide aims to help healthcare PR professionals understand how best to approach journalists The Healthcare Communications Association (HCA) and Medical Journalists’ Association (MJA) have launched a new best practice guide: 6-point guide to approaching health journalists with a media story. Based on research by the Medical Journalists Association and feedback from their members, the guide aims to help all those working in healthcare PR understand how best to...

Darwins Medicine blog Professor Brian D Smith is an authority on the pharmaceutical industry and works at SDA Bocconi University and Hertfordshire Business School. Relics from the past Terms that were once perfectly descriptive now only serve to tell us how the world has changed As a writer, I have a penchant for words. As a scientist, I have a preoccupation with Darwinian evolution. So, it’s not surprising that I am fascinated with the way language evolves. But this month, as I hosted an on...

Complex or simply misunderstood? With so many different specialists from health economists to public affairs through to key account managers involved in market access, is it any wonder that it remains ill-defined? Since the emergence of market access as a function more than a decade or so ago, its adoption into the strategic and operational fabric of the industries commercial activities has been the subject of much deliberation and debate. The evolution of market access as a discipline within t...