Blair Hesp and his team at Kainic Medical Communications are back in the office after the end of lockdown in New Zealand.

It’s another busy start to the day at Kainic Medical Communications in New Zealand on another cold winter’s morning in the south of New Zealand. Most importantly, we’re also celebrating the move to COVID Alert Level 1, i.e. completely back to normal, but with border restrictions, after eliminating COVID-19 from New Zealand.

Following a quick run for coffee at our local café, taking advantage of the prepaid tab we set up to support them while they were closed for lockdown, we have sat down for our usual morning team meeting where everyone gets up to speed on incoming work from the Northern Hemisphere overnight. In addition to the usual posters, manuscripts, slides and other med comms work, the team are also hard at work with a number of internal initiatives.

We’ve just launched First in Human Communications, our specialist pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics/toxicology offering, and not only have writing work coming in for that already, but have plenty of work to cover off including managing international trademark applications today and follow-up materials to support the launch. We’re also working on putting a preprint up on MedRXiv as we await peer review comments to an internal research project analysing how open peer review affects both reviewer and author behaviour, which we hope to be getting comments back on soon.

We will of course also be joining the NZ medical writers group Zoom call later in an hour so, and now that we are back in the office, we hopefully won’t have kids and animals gatecrashing the call on our end anymore.