What I Offer - Quicksilver Healthcare Communications

Need to formulate a compelling core narrative for your brand or mission?

Need to empower and engage with a target patient population?

Need to optimise your clinical trial recruitment and retention?

Need sound, insight-driven strategic advice for your communications plans?

Need a particularly skilled and savvy medical writer?

Need to formulate a compelling core narrative for your brand or mission?

In a world of noise and clamour, most brand and cause messages struggle to be heard. Just a few have been able to break through by using the only tool that has ever moved minds and changed behaviours — great stories.
An effective story should be bold, passionate and human. It should have momentum, consistency and originality and work well with all communication channels.
I can distil your key claims, your pivotal data, your differentiators and your tangential messaging into a clear, compelling, linear narrative starting with unmet needs and building a convincing case for why your product or service is necessary, important and believable.
The core narrative can be tailored to resonate with each target audience, expanded into an engaging presentation with proof points at each stage, and condensed into a pithy ‘elevator pitch’.

Need to empower and engage with a target patient population?

It’s now well known that – when designing most healthcare communications campaigns – you ignore patients at your peril. This means not only including patient-facing deliverables in the tactical plan, but seeking broad and deep patient insights from the start and integrating the patient voice into the overall strategy.
Medical advances should be driven by insights from end-users and what matters to them. Time and again, lack of alignment has been revealed between patients’ subjective priorities and the objective viewpoint of clinicians. In clinical practice, shared decision-making and informed consent should underpin all interactions.
With ‘patient centricity’ an enduring buzzword, I can help you develop a strong, evidence-based communications programme, propelled by use of optimal lay language, made bespoke for the demographic profile, disease characteristics and health literacy of the patient population in question.

Need to optimise your clinical trial recruitment and retention?

Patient recruitment is almost always the biggest hurdle to efficient clinical trial implementation and can cost millions to sponsors if slow or delayed.
Part of the problem is that clinical trial recruitment materials are often insufficiently insight-driven and fail to seek appropriate input from target patient populations as to their key drivers, motivators, concerns and preoccupations. In addition, informed consent discussions – so critical for building trust with potential participants – are often conducted by researchers who have not benefited from training tools to guide them in optimal patient communication for the study in question – or indeed for clinical research in general.
I can work with you to plan and design effective clinical trial communications leveraging my extensive experience with world-leading CROs including IQVIA, Duke University Clinical Research Institute, Parexel and Icon, my patient engagement skills and my years of experience as a member of a London-based research ethics committee (the equivalent of a US IRB).

Need sound, insight-driven strategic advice for your communications plans?

If you are planning a new communications initiative – or, if an agency, pitching for new business – you obviously need a situational analysis and appropriate market/audience insights. In my experience, a lot of time and effort can be spent gathering background information of only marginal relevance.
I am skilled at identifying and implementing research that ‘cuts to the chase’ and creates a robust springboard for strategic thinking.
From that standpoint, I can help you formulate a strong and coherent communications strategy designed to simultaneously satisfy the needs of Marketing, Medical and Legal.

Need a particularly skilled and savvy medical writer?

If you need a medical writer to churn out copy based on templates, I probably won’t be cost-effective. But if you need someone who will consider the best way to achieve ultimate objectives in every case, I can help. From formulation and refinement of key messages through to polished final deliverables for print or digital use, my writing experience spans website content, video scripts, press materials, congress presentations, white papers, newsletters, reports from advisory boards and expert panels, patient recruitment and retention materials for clinical trials and review articles intended for publication in academic journals.
Writing for different audiences means more than just simplifying technical explanations for non-specialists. It means putting yourself in the shoes of your audience and giving prominence to the things that each audience cares about most. It also means experimenting with word choices, styles and tonalities to make the copy as articulate and compelling as possible without crossing legal or ethical boundaries or failing to acknowledge cultural norms or the sensitivities of the patient-physician relationship.
I am experienced at choosing language that meets and exceeds marketing and/or educational objectives while satisfying medical and legal reviewers and – where necessary – the needs of third party partners such as patient advocacy groups or scientific societies.

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