7. Resources and Survey

Resources

Book

Salem-Wiseman, Lisa and Zaman, Sobia. Writing for Canadian Health Professionals. Toronto: Nelson College Indigenous (2nd edition), 2014.

PDF Summary

This PDF summarizes the key points of this course and gives practical writing tips. Ideal for printing and distributing to your staff.

Websites

General Writing Resources

• Tech Republic provides a good list of 10 Simple Things You Can Do to Improve Your Writing
• The James Lind Institute offers a number of resources, including Three Steps to Get Your Writing in Shape (eliminate the junk words; eliminate repetition; limit ideas)
• …and Steps Towards Good Medical Writing (understandable; transparent; clear; credible; efficient; simple)
• Science Docs Inc provides a good list of things to keep in mind for health professionals and managers who have to do some writing
• This University of Toronto site has writing handouts on many topics, such as dangling modifiers, faulty parallelism, fixing comma splices, possessives, sentence errors, and punctuation
• From the National Centre for Biotechnology Information: this is more for people who want to become medical writers, but in the last half there is a good list of things to think about when writing
• A free professional writing style training course from Design Sensory, in 12 lessons

Inclusive Writing

• Diversity at Work: Inclusive language guidelines
• The Centre for Health Journalism looks at the value of the soft skills (such as observation) that writing develops
• This resource is specifically for scientific writing, based on the premise that “communication is not something added onto science – it is the essence of science.” Gives examples of mistakes and solutions
• Issues to reflect on with regard to cultural and gender barriers in communication, and ways to overcome them
• Things to think about when communicating with patients and other end-users who have limited English proficiency

Objectives Review

In the design of this course we hoped to achieve the following objectives:

• Recognize good writing as an essential skill within the healthcare sector
• Understand the importance of knowing who your audience is, including IEHPs
• Identify some of the basics of inclusive writing
• Have tools to deal with the difficulties you may encounter in writing

You’ve completed the course!

We hope that you found it helpful and thought-provoking.

The Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto is conducting an exit survey for this course to better understand how participants are benefitting from the Workplace Integration Network (WIN) program. Your participation in the survey is important and will help us identify areas where the WIN program is helping people the most and any areas that can be improved.

All of the information collected from the survey participants will be summarized and no names will be reported on, so please let us know how you really feel. Participation in the survey is completely voluntary, but we hope that you see the benefit of participating.

We need and value your feedback.