Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

Experienced CME/CE medical writer and educator with strong background in adult learning theories + clinical practice as Registered Nurse. Proven ability to create content; manage projects; liaise with clinicians; and collaborate.

Specializing in:
- Needs assessments + practice gap analysis
- Grant development (pharma, federal, corporate, foundation)
- Expert + in-practice Interviews
- Literature search + synthesize
- Outcomes focused learning objectives
- Enduring materials (print + online/interactive)
- Case-based CME
- Peer reviewed manuscripts
- Pre- + post-tests

1. In-depth Practice Interviews
2. Video Panel Moderator Guides

• 2012 Q4 Projects

  • September 2011 to December 2011
  Team Members: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

  In Q4, Thistle Editorial, LLC helped clients:
  - Develop CME grants in oncology, neurology and endocrinology
  - Create moderator guides for video panel discussions on chronic lymphocytic leukemia taped at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology in San Diego, CA
  - Create implementation guides and case studies in managing multiple sclerosis
  - Conduct in-practice interviews with clinicians
  

• Body in Society

  • Polity
  • 2003
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

• Embodying Gender

  • Sage
  • 2005
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

• Researching Trust and Health

  • Routledge
  • 2008
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP, Julie Brownlie, Alexandra Greene,

• The Body: Critical Concepts in Sociology

  • 2003
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP, Andrew Blaikie, Mike Hepworth, Mary Holmes, David Inglis

• Between the demands of truth and government’: health practitioners, trust and immunisation work

  • Social Science & Medicine, Volume 62, Issue 2, Pages 433-443
  • 2006
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP, J.Brownlie

  Applied and theoretical work on health governance and governmentality has often not engaged with the perspectives of practitioners and, in particular, with their understandings about trust. In this paper, we address these absences through looking at a critical technology of governmentality—child immunisation. We do this, first, by examining theoretical links between risk, trust and knowledge in relation to the governance of health. We then draw on findings from our secondary analysis of qualitative data based on interviews with key actors in primary care in Scotland charged with the delivery of a particular immunisation—the MMR vaccine. While many practitioners, like parents, have typically perceived immunisation—along with other public health initiatives—as obligatory and as part of ‘good citizenship’, we argue that in relation to MMR and in the context of clinical governance, practitioners are having to engage in complex negotiations about knowledge and trust—negotiations that are at the heart of governing health at a distance.

• ’Leaps of faith and relationality': an empirical study of trust

  • Sociology 39(2), 221-240
  • 2005
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP, Julie Brownlie

  Möllering has argued for sociological research on trust that pays attention to the ‘fine details of interpretation’ and begins from the perspectives of those engaged in relations of trust. In this article we explore what it would mean to take up Möllering’s challenge to explore the interpretative elements of trust and the ‘leaps of faith’ trusting entails.We do this through an empirical study of parental and professional talk about the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination. We examine trust as operating in a number of interrelated ways: as a practice based on knowledge; as a ‘leap of faith’ experienced through relationality and familiarity; as working at a system level; and as shaped by relations of governance and by anxieties to do with the nature of social and technological change. Through this analysis, we suggest how an interpretive approach to thinking about trust is a worthwhile exercise.

• The body in sociology: tensions inside and outside sociological thought

  • Sociological Review 49(3), 297-317
  • 2001
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP, David Inglis

  The human body has in recent years become a ‘hot’ topic in sociology, not just in empirical research but also in sociological theorizing. In the latter context, the body has been variously a resource for broadening the parameters of traditional sociological thought deriving from the nineteenth century, and for overturning that paradigm and fundamentally reorienting the assumptions and concepts of sociological thinking. Attempts to abandon the old paradigm and foster a new one through the means of thinking about bodies are many and manifold, and in this paper we trace out the intricate history of moves towards a ‘corporeal sociology’. We identify the dilemmas that have attended these developments, especially as concerns the ways in which new modes of thinking sociologically have tended to founder over the classical sociological dichotomy between social structure and social action. Through tracing out the various moves and counter-moves within this field, we identify a central contradiction that affects all contemporary sociological practice, not just that dealing with the body: an oscillation between judging the utility of conceptual tools in terms of criteria derived from the discipline of Cultural Studies, and evaluating the arguments created by those tools on the basis of the incompatible criteria of classical sociology. The paper challenges sociologists to choose one set of criteria or the other, for sociological practice cannot be based on both such antagonistic paradigms.

• Locating Uncertainties in Cervical Screening

  • Health, Risk and Society 3(2), 167-179
  • 2001
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

  ervical screening has been carried out in the UK since at least the 1960s. As a central aspect of health policy it is the focus of a sustained research agenda across the social and biomedical sciences. On the whole there is considerable consensus concerning its effectiveness as a preventive strategy, although screening is also subject to substantial scrutiny across a range of persistent issues. However, the expansion of screening raises new challenges for the social sciences. These are reflected in recent studies which exemplify a notable shift in the frameworks adopted by social scientists in their approach to cervical screening. While this work focuses on distinct aspects of cervical screening, in common to many studies is the identification of various degrees and forms of uncertainty which are embedded within, and generated by, the processes and practices of cervical screening. This paper presents a synthesis of recent research on cervical screening, describes these points of uncertainty and outlines the implications of the analysis presented for a social science research agenda.

• Watching you—watching me: visualizing techniques and the cervix

  • Women’s Studies International Forum 24(1), 97-110
  • 2001
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

• Cervical Screening, Compliance and Moral Obligation

  • Sociology of Health and Illness 21(4), 401-425
  • 1999
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

  Cervical screening has been subject to extensive scrutiny within the social sciences over the last two decades. Moreover, it has been described, in passing, as an example of `surveillance medicine' through which new aspects of people's lives are brought under medical scrutiny. Cervical screening is an example of secondary prevention with which women, on the whole, are expected and encouraged to comply, in what are deemed to be their best interests. However, the social science literature on cervical screening tends to present compliance as a morally neutral and unproblematic response to information about disease prevention. In contrast, this paper seeks to illustrate how women draw on specific contexts and relationships through which participation in, or compliance with screening, is given meaning. Drawing on women's accounts of their experience of screening participation, the paper suggests that compliance with cervical screening cannot be viewed exclusively as a morally neutral, if desirable, outcome of disease prevention initiatives, but may also be embedded within a moral framework of self-responsibility and social obligation.

• Surveillance, Knowledge and Risk: the Embodied Experience of Cervical Screening

  • Health 2(2), 195-212
  • 1998
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

  Risk and surveillance have emerged as two prominent themes concerning the substantive topic of public health and prevention. While these themes have largely been addressed as discrete issues within the sociology of health and illness, of late there has been a concerted effort to address the relationship between the two. This paper examines an aspect of prevention which is often implicitly identified in terms of both risk and surveillance; that of cervical screening in Britain. First I discuss how risk and surveillance have been brought together in the sociology of health and illness and outline some limitations in their application to substantive topics such as prevention. Second, I introduce cervical screening and proceed with a discussion of textual and interview data which throws light on the status of risk in cervical screening as both an objective and subjective category.

• No gods and precious few women: gender and cultural identity in Scotland

  • Scottish Affairs No. 2, Winter, 37-49
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

• Visual matters in learning and teaching

  • Learning and Teaching, Volume 1, Number 3, Winter 2008 , pp. 43-66(24)
  • 2008
  Authors: Alexandra Howson MA, PhD, CCMEP

  This article reports on the incorporation of visual material as a tool for learning sociology and discusses a poster assignment introduced as a means of assessment in an academic context committed to innovative learning strategies and to teaching and learning enhancement. The article draws on an evaluation of using the poster assignment to assess student learning and argues that visual images can provide valid and insightful ways of 'telling about society' which challenge the reliance on text as a means of teaching and learning sociology. The article explores the context in which visual materials are used in teaching and learning sociology and their impact on and significance for assessment and learning.

Websites:

• Personal Website

Groups and Associations:

American Medical Writers Association Editorial Freelancers Association

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  Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (Official Group)
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  American Medical Writers Association (AMWA)
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  Best Practices for Medical Education
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  CME Collaborative Think Tank
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  CME Universe
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  Connected Health Community
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  Continuing Medical Education
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  Continuing Medical Education Buzz Group
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  Editorial Freelancers Association
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  European CME Forum
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  European Medical Writers Association (EMWA)
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  Freelancers in MedComm
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  Grant Writers - Grant Writing
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  Healthcare IT Thinktank
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  Instructional Designers and Curriculum Writers
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  JEMS: Today in EMS
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  Linked:Seattle
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  Medical Education Online (MEO)
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  Medical Marketing & Communications Group
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  Medical Writers Networking Forum
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  NC-CME Colleagues
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  NHS Contract Professionals
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  NIH Grant Writers
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  Professional Medical / Scientific Writers
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  Resource Development Associates
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  StoryCare
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  The University of Edinburgh Alumni
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  e-Patient Connections

Honors and Awards:

Visiting Scholar, Beatrice Main Research Group, UC Berkeley 2006