Key Topic 8: Working with patients and the public

You should consider anyone who is not a health professional as a member of the general public. The over arching principle to consider with this audience is that for the majority of countries, promotion or ‘advertising’ of prescription medicines to the general public is forbidden. (Notable exceptions are the USA).

Therefore any material designed for the general public must be non promotional in content, appearance and tone. The requirements for the material to be factual, accurate and balanced all apply.

Patients are a special subset of the general public. Patients may be people who have been prescribed and are being treated with an AstraZeneca product, or representatives of a patient population (e.g. members of a patient organisation).

In this training module we will focus in turn on the following areas that you are most likely to work on with respect to this audience: