患者参与

We believe patients should be at the centre of all medical research and communication. It is our responsibility to ensure the work we do is relevant, accessible and understandable for patients. We aim to involve patients in all project types across the company and can provide guidance on positive, compliant and meaningful patient engagement.

Patient engagement in the pharmaceutical and MedTech industries not only involves patient-friendly writing to increase the accessibility and understandability of medical research, but also requires the involvement of patients in designing, developing and evaluating healthcare products and solutions.

增强患者的能力

Engaged patients are better able to make informed decisions about their care options, and can take charge of their treatment journey, thus improving the shared-decision making process.

改善患者和制药企业之间的关系

Experience to date demonstrates that the involvement of patients has resulted in increased transparency, trust and mutual respect between them and other stakeholders.

改进新药的发现、开发和评估

Drawing on patient knowledge and experience helps to understand what it is like to live with a specific condition, how care is administered and the day-to-day use of medicines. This helps to improve discovery, development, and evaluation of new, effective medicines.

给病人带来真正的好处

Consistent patient engagement enables pharmaceutical and MedTech companies to offer products and services that have real patient benefits.

Our dedicated team collaborates with project teams across the company to ensure patients are engaged in a respectful, sustainable and impactful way

患者问卷调查

Developed and conducted to collect quantitative or qualitative data about patients’ experiences and treatment preferences, surveys can give patients a voice in medical research.

通熟易懂的摘要

Easy-to-read summaries of complex scientific publications or health technology assessments can increase accessibility of trial data and help empower patients.

患者咨询委员会和圆桌会议

Facilitating and capturing discussion on unmet need or innovative solutions to help inform research questions, trial design and holistic healthcare solutions.

以患者为中心的材料和传单

To educate or increase awareness of a specific disease, issue or healthcare solution through patient-friendly writing and understandable images.

患者作家和审稿人

Patients can provide new perspectives and ensure relevance and accessibility through their review or authorship of materials.

信息图表和动画

Our Design team have extensive experience in developing infographics, animations and videos that make complex scientific concepts and data understandable for patients and the public.

Our patient engagement team can support the respectful and productive involvement of patients in our work, and Costello Medical employees are trained on the importance and impact of meaningful patient engagement. Scientific teams throughout the company are taught how to write in patient-friendly language.

To request a quote, or for more information on the patient engagement services at Costello Medical, please contact Emma Phillips.

案例展示

患者咨询委员会

Costello Medical provided support with a patient advisory board in early breast cancer, which aimed to learn about people’s experiences of accessing and using information about breast cancer. The resulting insights and recommendations were planned to support the development of future breast cancer materials, to help patients feel informed and educated about their disease and treatment options, and empower them to speak to their healthcare professionals.

Costello Medical worked with the client to ensure the advisory board was designed and run in a sensitive and patient-friendly way. This included working with an independent, professional facilitator, who had experience navigating emotional topics with members of the public, ensuring there were options for ‘time-out’ during the meeting, and using appropriate language throughout materials.
Throughout the project, we collaborated and advised the client on how to compliantly deliver a patient advisory board. For example, we clearly requested that patients did not mention specific treatments to avoid potential promotion of prescription-only medicines and adhered to all adverse event reporting processes.
After the meeting, we developed and shared a summary with the patients, so they could see how they had contributed and were provided with a tangible outcome.

对病人友好的写作改进

Costello Medical provided support with a suite of publications detailing the burden of disease and impact of treatment resistant depression. Our client felt that it was important for these data to be accessible and understandable by patients and the public, as the disease has such a large impact on patients and society more widely. To make the journal articles more patient-friendly, Costello Medical worked with the client to develop a range of publication enhancements, which we published alongside the articles on the journal website.

We collaborated with a patient advocacy group to develop a plain language summary of the key results article. The group reviewed and suggested changes to the text that Costello Medical had written. This ensured the content was interesting and relevant for patients and the language was both sensitive and understandable, resulting in a more readable and engaging plain language summary for patients.
Additionally, we worked with our design team to develop a patient-focused animated summary that highlighted the personal impact of the disease and demonstrated the large unmet need in this patient group. The animation aimed to humanise the science and make the study findings and conclusions easy to understand.
Five-minute author interviews were also developed in which clinician authors explained what we already know about the disease area, why the study was carried out and its key findings, and provided their thoughts on what the paper means for clinicians and patients. One of these included subtitles to increase accessibility.

患者团体技能方案

Our team had the pleasure of providing communication skills training to representatives from eight non-profit organisations from September 2021 to March 2022. We ran a programme of five sessions to equip the attendees with the tools and skillset needed to develop engaging materials for patients, clinicians and other rare disease stakeholders.

The training sessions used a mixture of presentations, technical demonstrations and group-led discussions and covered three key areas:

Planning and drafting content
Adding visual elements
Actively disseminating the final material

Additional tailored support and strategic guidance was offered to the attendees through 1:1 mentoring. Our Design team also developed bespoke icons for each group to use in their branding and promotional materials.

The attendees were able to utilise this training to produce their own communication materials and by the end of the programme, had begun to develop a range of materials such as disease management information booklets, leaflets and social media posts, some of which were shared on Rare Diseases Day 2022.

We were delighted to see the positive impact of the training. Chloe Joyner, founder of Usher Kids UK, had this to say about the programme:

“I will use these skills in all future projects. I feel more confident in knowing how to achieve a more professional outcome in my communication materials and am going to review all future projects against this standard.”

References

European Patients’ Academy on Therapeutic Innovation (EUPATI) Guidance for patient involvement in industry-led medicines R&D. Available online here.