PhD project: Improving medicine risk communication to general practitioners

Every day general practioners receive all kinds of new information about new medicines and new research. But what do they need in their everyday practice in front of their patients? How can we secure that they receive vital information about newly discovered medicine risk? Normally physicians and HCPs receive this kind of information in a letter. But that mode of communication in not very beneficial to physicians nor patients.

For those reasons this project sets out to understand how general practitioners prefer receiving this information and what is important for them to know about medicine. With this knowledge future communications may better support the decisions they make when prescribing medicine.

I study rhetorical, political and sociological aspects of medical information artifacts that address regulatory, clinical and/or non-technical publics, such as medicine risk advisories, clinical guidelines and public hearings.

Qualitative methods
I work with qualitative and text-oriented methods such as

• Document analysis
• Rhetorical analysis and criticism
• Semi-structured interviews
• Focus group interviews
• Protocol analysis