An analysis of interactive hands-on workshops on medical writing

To assess the improvement in participant's knowledge and skills pertaining to medical writing by interactive hands-on workshops.

During the course of three months (January to March 2009), four interactive 5 hours hands-on workshops were organized on Medical Writing. All participants completed a pre-workshop and post-workshop questionnaire. Fourteen questions were included in both questionnaires related to workshop outline. Eight questions were related to knowledge of the participants about different aspects of medical writing (yes/no). Participants were also asked six questions to rate their skills relating to medical writing on a numerical scale of 1-5 (1: no skills and 5: expert). Participant's feedbacks were also analyzed. The pre-workshop and post-workshop responses were compared to see if there was any significant difference by using McNemar test and paired-t test where appropriate.

Response to eight questions regarding knowledge (authorship criteria, types of data, application of significance test, search techniques, plagiarism, Vancouver style of reference and copyright statement) showed that there was a significant difference in all responses (p < 0.005). Same trend was observed in skills rating (literature search, basic data analysis, writing an original article, writing references, paper submission for publication) of participants themselves before and after the workshop (p < 0.0001). Analysis of feedback showed that participants found the workshop informative, practical and helpful in improvement of their skills for paper writing.

Short interactive hands-on medical writing workshops are helpful and beneficial in improving the knowledge and skills of the participants.