How can I be a resilient Medical Writer?

Medical writing is a great career, but it can be challenging at times.

There are lots of things to get your head around, lots of different types of project and different drugs you could be working on, different ways of working on those projects, and things are changing fast, not just in MedComms, but in the wider world.

I’m Eleanor Steele, and I’m the MedComms Mentor.

I have been a Medical Writer, but I’ve also worked with literally hundreds as a colleague and team member, as a mentor and line manager, as a person briefing and reviewing their work, as a freelancer.

I have made quite a few observations in my time working in MedComms with all of these different Medical Writers, and I don’t want to stereotype, but there are some broad similarities and key things that I think that it is good to think about in terms of how we can be resilient Medical Writers, and build a really sustainable and fulfilling career.

So I’ve talked about this a little bit in my previous video, looking at the skills, experience, and mindset that you need to be a Medical Writer, but today we’re going to be going a bit deeper. We’re going to be thinking about some of the pitfalls that might occur as Medical Writers and how we could potentially avoid them. Things to try, things that might help.

We’re all individuals though, so anything that I say needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, because you need to think about what is relevant for you, what’s going to be useful for you specifically. And it might be that I’ve given you some things to think about, but I don’t have all of the answers that are going to be relevant because, well, I can’t cover everything in one short video like this.

So please do in particular for this video, if you have any questions, let me know and I will do what I can to help. But let’s get into the first microtip.

1. Build your support network

Everybody needs a support network – that’s just a factor of being human. It’s not special to people in MedComms, but it’s so useful to have a support network of people within MedComms who understand what you’re going through.

MedComms is a bit different. It’s slightly niche, it is a bit hidden to people who aren’t within the industry. So having a network within the industry means that you are more likely to be able to find people who you can talk to, who get it. So it’s useful to have people who can celebrate the wins, but also soften the blows because working in MedComms can be quite up and down.

There are the traditional peaks and troughs of deadlines and busy periods with congresses and other meetings and things like that, and working through those can be quite tough.

But there are also other aspects of MedComms that aren’t necessarily relevant for other industries. The amount of feedback we get is one thing in particular, and sometimes that feedback can be rather bluntly phrased, shall we say. It can feel brutal.

Now, hopefully this isn’t something that’s going to be coming from people within your team, but we get feedback from so many different people, clients, external experts, and potentially other stakeholders involved in the projects that we are working on.

And they aren’t necessarily thinking about the person who they are feeding back to. They are just thinking about what point they want to get across and what that means for the project.

If you are the Medical Writer on the receiving end of it though, that doesn’t make it any easier to see somebody scribbling all over the project that you have slaved over for hours, especially if the feedback is taking you in completely the opposite direction of how you had been briefed.

That can be so difficult to hear, but it’s actually relatively common.

Now, if you do receive feedback that is along those lines, don’t worry. It is common and it is not the end of the world. It doesn’t mean that you’ve done a bad job, it just means that somebody has a different perspective, and that shouldn’t be tied into your feeling of self-worth.

As Medical Writers, we take things incredibly seriously, and that’s part of why we’re good at what we do. But we do need to be able to disconnect our work from our feeling of self-worth. Otherwise, we are going to run into real problems with resilience and potentially, it can lead to burnout because we take things so seriously.

We don’t ever let ourselves stop. We’re always trying to do things to the nth degree.

If you get harsh feedback, remember it’s not about you. It’s something that happens because people are trying to make the project that you are all collaborating on the best that it can be. And think of it like that, even if it is phrased in a rather unfortunate way.

It’s almost certainly not a reflection of how they think about you as a person and almost certainly not about you as a writer. So focusing on what you can learn from it is incredibly valuable, and will help you make that separation between your work and your self-worth.

What you can learn from it is sometimes a little bit hidden, but usually it is possible to dig behind how the feedback is phrased and find the essence of that feedback, what it was trying to achieve, what it is suggesting about that project, and then you can take the poison out and do the work that’s necessary based on that feedback.

Then you can look back at it afterwards and think, ‘OK, what can I learn from that feedback?’ This is something we’re going to think about in a later section of the video too, but it’s such an important part of being a resilient writer because we can learn from everything.

We also need to think about how we find solutions to problems, and this is another area where our support network can be incredibly valuable.

Medical writing is complicated and there are lots of different things that we need to think about and lots of different approaches that we can take. Having people within the team, or if you are a freelancer in particular than somebody within your network who you can use as a sounding-board is incredibly valuable for figuring out those little complexities or problems that could derail a project if you get into an overthinking spiral.

Again, this is something that’s quite common with Medical Writers because we want to do a good job, but we can see all the potential different options and all of the possible papers that we can use and the data sources that might be available, but we can’t use all of them.

That’s not going to be a good use of time or budget, and it’s probably not going to fit into the project. So we need to prioritise, and sometimes the best way we can do that is just by talking it through with somebody.

Now, as I said, having a support network is particularly crucial within MedComms, and I would say for freelancers, it’s almost more important than for people within agencies, because you’ve kind of got a built-in support network if you are working within an agency. You’re going to have a line manager, you’re going to have teammates, you’re going to have people around you who are working on the same project, who you can talk to.

Freelancers can be a little bit more isolated. Now, I’ve talked about this in previous videos about how freelancers can find support and the types of support that are available to freelancers, but it kind of applies to all remote workers too.

Even if you’re part of an agency team or if you’re a freelancer, you are on your own in your house most of the time. And so making the effort to actually build those relationships and show up for those events that may take time out of your working day that sometimes you can’t really justify, are so important for making sure that you’ve got that network and you get the support that you need.

2. Everything is a learning opportunity

One of the things that I really loved when I was working as a Medical Writer was how there were so many things to learn – so much new stuff to keep me interested. And having that eagerness to learn is definitely important, and that way we can view everything as a learning opportunity.

Have that learning mindset when things get tricky of ‘I haven’t cracked this yet, but I’m going to,’ or ‘I find writing ad board reports hard at the moment, but I know I can get better. I know I can do this!’ rather than having a fixed mindset of, ‘This is difficult, I can’t do it.’

Having that sort of fixed mindset means that we are less likely to take in the information and see the opportunities that are available to us even when they’re right in front of our faces.

As writers though, we need to remember that everything about writing is a skill to be practised and honed. It’s not an innate talent that you either have or don’t have.

Yes, there are some people who take to writing a little bit more naturally than others and feel comfortable in that medium, but we can all do it.

We can all improve, we can all learn, and one of my big tips for learning and taking on new information and getting to grips with MedComms is to get involved with business development as early as you can.

There are so many things about business development opportunities that are great for learning. It is often something that’s quite new and there’ll be people involved who you don’t work with on a day-to-day basis, and it’s usually quite a short-term project, basically, where you will get a brief from the client who needs some support, and you will either be producing a proposal or a pitch so that they can decide whether you are the agency that they want to work with.

While it might take time away from other projects and be tricky to squeeze in, that’s the case for everybody involved, but being involved from start to finish is such a rewarding thing, and you will see so many different aspects of the business.

Now, obviously, business development opportunities like this don’t come up every day, and even when they do come up, you may not have the capacity or the right skills or experience to get involved every time. But you hopefully will get some proper training sessions or access to training activities at some point during your career.

When you do have the opportunity to go to a training session or do some training online or whatever it is, think about what you want to get out of it before you go. Taking a few minutes to just think about the things that you have as a priority to learn from this particular activity or whatever it is.

And if it’s a live training activity with a trainer, somebody leading the session, have some questions that you can ask them, so that you can really focus on the things that you are interested and that you want to learn.

After the session, reflect back, think about whether you actually got what you were hoping for or whether there’s more that you need to do or further support that you need.

And if there is, ask. Maybe ask your line manager or go back to the person who ran the training session. We want to make sure when we are delivering training that we give you what you need to be able to go on and use those skills or that information in your work. That’s why we’re doing it.

Also, you should be making notes during your training, and you can often look at specific aspects of the training content.

Maybe you’ll get the slides. Maybe you’ll get a summary. Maybe you’ll get some supporting materials that were created during the session.

Look back at those and prioritise things that you want to take into your working processes, or things that you want to practise or try.

We can’t learn everything all at once and we can’t get everything right first time. There’s so much to think about in so many different aspects of medical writing, that it’s much more effective if we focus on one thing at a time and really concentrate on how we’re going to use that, practise it and hone that skill before we move on to something else.

Now a lot of the training that we get as Medical Writers is through the briefs that we receive and the review feedback that we get. This is the core of on-the-job training.

If we can use those briefs and the review feedback as training activities, not just steps to get task done, then they are going to be so much more valuable.

We can reflect on them for their broader learning opportunities and make sure that we think about how we can use them for the next project that we do, or maybe even the next project that is completely unrelated because there are often things that are transferable across all types of project, especially when we’re starting out as Medical Writers because there is so much to learn.

But you can also learn things from other types of activity.

In status meetings you can hear about other projects that are going on within your account, maybe other roles that people are doing within the team. You can hear about people who might be useful for you to connect with and talk with – maybe have a bit of a curious conversation with them about what they do, how they do it, and whether it might be something that you might want to aim to do. Or maybe somebody that you want to involve in your work, use as a sounding-board – chat things through with them.

Client meetings are also another great opportunity. You can hear about how they work within their team, which is probably going to be quite different from your team. You can glean how that particular pharma company works and slot things together about pharma in general. You can think about their priorities, their objectives, how they are viewing the projects that you are working on, not just how you view them.

Another key thing though, that we all need to learn, but especially Medical Writers, is how to say no.

This is probably one of the hardest things that a Medical Writer needs to learn because we often want to say yes to everything because it’s all a learning opportunity, and we are eager to experience lots of different project types, lots of different therapy areas, and work with lots of different people.

But if we overload ourselves, then we are not going to be able to do all of the work. We are not going to be able to take on board all of the things that we could be learning, and we’ll probably end up not doing a brilliant job on anything.

So before you say yes to something new, think about how much you’ve got on.

It’s a really great idea to talk to your line manager about your priorities and your commitments before you agree to do something. Maybe look at your diary or the deadlines that you’ve got coming up and the amount of work that is needed. It should be easy to map across what you’ve got on your plate and the hours that you are expecting that it will take for you to do it.

Now, this is something that we’re going to talk about in a bit more detail later on, but having those conversation with with your line manager when you’re in the early stages of your career will help you get to be a better judge of whether or not you can fit something in.

3. Reflect on your process

In this section, I’m going to be digging a bit deeper into a couple of things that came up in the previous section. So reflecting on your briefing and review feedback and thinking about how it applies to this project, this type of project, other projects and your work in general is incredibly important.

And the reason that this is the case is because we all have individual writing processes. There might be crossovers between you and your fellow team members or your line manager. The way that you work, the way that you approach information, the way that you actually get through a project from blank page to finished article.

But there are also probably going to be some big differences, and it can be difficult to figure out what your process really is when you are starting your career as a Medical Writer, because you don’t know what you don’t know.

You may have done a lot of writing previously, but the types of things that we work on and the ways that they need to be put together, can often mean that we’re being forced into processes that aren’t necessarily a natural fit for how we work and how our minds work.

That means that reflecting on what you’re being briefed and the steps and instructions that you’re being given, and the way that you think you should do it, is really, really valuable. And when we come across, as we all will, tasks or areas of writing where there’s a lot of friction, it just doesn’t seem to be happening, it doesn’t seem to be working, and we can’t work out why, talk to people.

Talk to other people in your team. Talk to your line manager, talk to a mentor maybe, talk to other people within your broader network – as long as there’s no conflict of interest, and disclosure of confidential information, obviously.

But, talking about the way that you approach things usually won’t mean going into the specifics of the data or the drug that you are working on, or the project that your client has asked you to do. It’s more about how you approach a particular aspect of the writing.

And then once you’ve talked to people, try different things. Give yourself the space to experiment and see what works. See what you want to take forward into other projects.

Now this reflection and updating of your processes isn’t just about writing. I think one of the other key areas where we need to think about what we’re doing, and make sure that we are doing it appropriately and in the best way for us, is prioritisation.

It can be very tempting when we are given a project to do or given feedback to incorporate into one of our existing projects, to start at the beginning and go through to the end.

That can be very problematic in medical writing tasks. We need to think about the order in which we’re going to do those tasks before we get started, and we need to put them into a priority order strategically.

So first of all, anything that involves other people needs to be flagged or started before you get on with simple things like text changes or rewriting a section based on fairly simplistic instructions.

We need to make sure that if we need additional data, that is requested as soon as we realise it’s the case, because we don’t know how long it’s going to take before it actually is available and gets sent through.

If we need to have a call to discuss anything, if there’s something that’s unclear or we need further updates, we need to get that call in the diary because again, we don’t know how long it’s going to take for that to happen, and often the people that we’re working with have incredibly busy diaries, and our project may be way down at the bottom of their priority list, even if it’s high up on the top of yours.

So looking at what needs to happen first and why it needs to happen first is something that we need to reflect on on a regular basis, so that we can make sure that we are not wasting time and our timelines won’t suffer.

4. Manage your time

Prioritising our workload appropriately is important, but we also need to manage our time in a broader way too.

This is partly about knowing how long it’s going to take us to do each aspect of the project that we’re working on, and this can be really hard to judge when we are early in our career or if we’re doing something that’s new, because we don’t know how long something’s going to take when we’ve never tackled anything like that before.

Usually you should have some time that has been allocated for each task or for that project in your brief. That should come from the budget and be based on what has been agreed in the scope with the client.

If you’re a relatively new Medical Writer, you might also be given the expected time that it is likely to take you, which might not really relate back to what’s in the budget.

When we are training Medical Writers, we know that it’s not going to take the same amount of time if you’ve never done something before, than somebody who is very, very experienced, so we take that into account. Some of the time will be either allocated to training time, or it just won’t be charged back to the client.

We factor that in when we are making resourcing plans for new writers, and that’s OK. We want to give you an expectation of how long something’s going to take, but we also do need to know how long has been agreed with the client because we have to factor all of those things in.

But if you are working on something and it is taking either way longer or way less time than is in your brief, check with the person who briefed you. Because sometimes we are going to slightly misinterpret what is actually required, and that can have a massive impact on the time that it takes.

We don’t want to be taking much longer than has been allocated in the budget because that’s obviously going to have an impact on the commercial viability of the project.

And we also don’t want to be taking away less time because that might mean that we are not actually doing enough work – it’s not going to be thorough enough.

If you have factored all of that in, it is going to be much more straightforward to get the job done to the right level of detail and hopefully make everybody happy.

When we are looking at a bigger task, like the draft of a project from an outline, then it’s a good idea at the start to break it down into small chunks. Maybe milestones that you know are going to need to be completed, and think about how much time it’s going to take to do each of those things and plot them into your calendar.

Now, it could be sections of the project like writing the introduction of the paper, and then the method section, and the results section, etc. Or it might be specific tasks that you know have to happen across the whole project. So maybe thinking about the story flow or thinking about different structural elements, maybe pulling in the key references and data maybe figuring out the key questions that you want to ask clients or authors.

Different people have different writing processes, as I mentioned earlier, and so you are going to need to figure out what kind of milestones work for your writing process, and then how that would break down into different amounts of time and the deadlines that you want to put into your calendar.

That can be incredibly useful for figuring out what your availability is like for picking up other projects potentially, or whether you are maybe falling behind and need to hurry up, or check in with your team to maybe rearrange priorities or deadlines.

Something else that comes under managing time is productivity in general. Something that we all struggle with these days is multitasking, and it’s a problem because our brains were not wired to multitask.

We need to focus on a single task to be really productive and get the work done properly, and that is particularly important for Medical Writers because what we’re working on is often so complicated.

We really do need all of our brain to be focused on that one thing rather than working on a bit, but keeping an eye on emails and Slack and Teams or whatever. There’s been a recent episode of the Squiggly Careers podcast, which looks at multitasking and different techniques that you can use to tackle that if it’s something that you struggle with, and there’s a link in the video description below to that. It’s really, really useful.

Now, a simple thing that can be helpful, it’s just to block some time in your calendar for focused work or for a particular project, so that you know that that is the time that you are going to be working on it.

It’s a good idea to think about when in your day that happens, and I know that given the number of meetings that might be in your calendar, you may not always have that flexibility to choose when you’re going to be working on specific projects, but it may well make sense to find a slot in the morning to work on really detailed projects where you are going to have to be writing things from scratch, or you might work better on those kind of projects later in the day when you’ve had a bit of time to run up to them.

Whatever works for your process, but if possible, try and schedule the time that you’re going to be working on different types of activity to the times in the day where you find that kind of work easiest.

Once you’ve blocked it out, put your Teams or Slack or email on mute, and don’t check in with them. That can be hard to resist, but the more we practise resisting, the easier it becomes.

You do also need to let people know how they can get hold of you in an emergency and have sort of one channel that will pop up, but hopefully there won’t be an emergency – you can just get your head down and focus on that project.

It is also quite helpful sometimes to book meetings for the time in the day when you naturally feel a bit of an energy dip. Having somebody else on a call or to chat with, even if it’s a standard meeting, like a catch-up with your line manager or a status meeting, that can really help you raise your energy up and give you a bit of a boost so that then you can go on and work on another kind of project.

I also like having my day interspersed with what I call ‘palate cleanser tasks.’ So these are more admin-based things. It might be working on a project linking references in Veeva or Zinc. It could be doing your timesheets, it could be doing a data check, maybe just general admin-type tasks, but anything that you find needs a bit less cognitive processing power so that you can just let yourself relax, close over a bit, and just get something simple and straightforward done so that you are not always trying to be performing at the same high level, working on complex things.

5. Support your future self

I’m a big believer in making things as easy as possible for my future self. This is a time investment and sometimes it’s hard to justify that time when we are in the midst of a project and things are very, very busy. But it can have a cumulative effect if we do put aside those few minutes and do these simple things to make life easier for the person we’ll be tomorrow, next week, next month.

Making notes about things to try is very, very useful. So when we’re working on a project, we will often have ideas about how we could have done something a bit more easily or a slightly different way. Once we’ve actually got to the end of doing that thing, we’ll have figured something out in that process. But if we don’t make a note of it, we will possibly have forgotten by the time we get to doing that kind of project again.

Making a note of it somewhere centralised that you know you will come back to is a great way of capturing that information so that you don’t go through the same possibly tedious, possibly frustrating process the next time you’re tackling that kind of work.

It’s also a good idea to make a note of things like that from training or from feedback in the same place, and prioritising what you want to try out and things that are going to be most useful for your development and progression.

That way, you’re not going to try to do everything all at once, because that is not possible, it’s not sustainable, and we are likely to just give up if we try. We’ll get overwhelmed. We won’t do a good job with any of it, so why bother.

Giving ourselves small prioritised things that we want to try or that we know will work in our next project is going to be a much better way of supporting our future self into doing things better and progressing quickly.

We can also make sure that we actually allow ourselves the time to figure things out, and give ourselves the space to make mistakes, because we can’t get everything right the first time every single project, and knowing that and understanding that there are going to be some areas where we do need to try a few different things, and get feedback, and ask questions. That way we’re going to be able to progress in a sustainable way and be resilient about it rather than get down about it or try too many things and feel overwhelmed.

It is also a good idea to make notes about what you have done, whether it worked and why you think it did or didn’t work. That way you can make sure that this progression and development is iterative, and it might be that you’ve figured out something new to do differently next time, or you have thought ‘Actually, no, I’m not going to try that again.’

If you don’t make a note of it, you might forget and actually go down the same route that you know, once you remember, won’t work.

6. Don’t be too rigid

I remember working with a junior Medical Writer a few years ago who got my review feedback on the project that we were working on together and was distraught.

Now I am very careful to make sure that all of my feedback is phrased constructively, and it was full of helpful suggestions and she had done a really good job considering she was new to the role

But she didn’t want feedback. She wanted to do everything right the first time, because that’s how things had panned out during her time at university.

She wanted to basically get a First for every project. She wanted me in the brief to tell her exactly what to do so that she could get it right. Now that’s not how things work in medical writing. It’s impossible to brief like that because you would basically be doing the project for the Medical Writer and they’re not going to learn anything from that process.

There’s also not just one way of doing things, and if we dictate as people briefing a project exactly how a Medical Writer should approach it and exactly what they should do, then they are not going to be able to give their input, and as a Medical Writer, they have more time to think about the project and really explore the details and the data than the person who is briefing it, because they’re involved in so many other projects that they just don’t have the capacity to devote to that one single thing.

That’s how the budgets work. That’s how the industry works.

Thinking about the different ways that a project can be done is also the best way to make sure that we are learning and progressing as Medical Writers. It’s usually not ‘our’ project, we are not the only person involved. We are supporting the content development for that wider project, and clients are the ones who are paying. They will often get the final say about what happens and how it happens and what’s included or not.

We can give them advice or guidance. We can ask them questions and maybe nudge their feedback in a particular direction, but we can’t insist that this is how it’s happening, this is what they’re going to get, whether they like it or not.

Sometimes our advice or guidance is pretty crucial, and there could be complications or consequences if they ignore it. If that’s the case, then we need to do what is known in the industry as a ‘CYA’ – cover your arse, in writing, making sure that it’s very clear that we have advised them that this is what needs to happen for whatever reason, and if they decide to go in a different way, that is absolutely fine because it is their prerogative, but is not our fault as the agency.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often, it occasionally crops up, but the clients are the ones who are paying.

One thing that we do need to make sure that we’re thinking about in terms of clients asking us to do things that aren’t necessarily in line with what we were expecting, is that we need to flag anything that’s out of scope – so hasn’t been agreed in the budget before we do it. We need to make sure that that’s factored into maybe the reconciliation, or it’s discussed with the client in terms of what the implications are in terms of budget and timelines, so that everybody is on the same page before the work happens.

We also sometimes have curve balls from external experts acting as speakers or authors or advisors, and this can also be tricky to manage if we’ve got a very rigid idea about what should go into the project, and what the objective of the project is, and how it’s going to be used.

External experts give us their clinical insights and they are part of the audience that we are writing for usually, or at least a lot closer to it than we are as Medical Writers, because we’re usually writing for a healthcare professional audience. They are healthcare professionals. We are not.

Even if you have a healthcare professional background, when you are working as a Medical Writer, you are not a practising clinician anymore. And that particular viewpoint, and often the particular specialty, means that we need to take into account what the experts are saying rather than push our own opinion on them.

Often they are also responsible for that content, particularly as authors publishing in peer reviewed journals, or the speaker who is actually going to be presenting the content that we are putting together – they need to be in charge of it. Yes, again, we can give them advice and guidance, but we have to accept that sometimes they’re going to ignore it.

Another aspect of not being too rigid that Medical Writers do sometimes struggle with, is that ‘good enough’ is sometimes good enough.

We have to make sure that when we are working on a project, that we are adhering to the budget and time that has been scoped out for that particular task, and that’s because it’s what the client needs, or is willing to pay for.

Going above and beyond needs to be a conscious, strategic choice, and sometimes agencies will make that choice. If it’s a new client and they really want to give the gold-plated service even though the client has only paid for the absolute bargain basement type of project, sometimes it’s worth it in the long run, but that strategic decision has to be made at a senior level and can’t be made on the fly just by the writer doing the work. If you think it’s necessary, check in with the senior team and make sure that this is the right way to go.

As Medical Writers, we can’t have rigid expectations about how a project is going to go or how our career is going to go.

Things are changing. We’ve got a lot to learn when we are Medical Writers, no matter what career stage we’re at, because medicine and MedComms are not static. The world isn’t static.

For a sustainable career, we have to let go of those rigid expectations and let ourselves and our work evolve.

Download the PDF summary

I want to help everyone in MedComms have a successful and sustainable career.

Being a Medical Writer isn’t easy, but if you follow these micro tips and:

1. Build your support network, so you’ve got people who understand what it’s like around you
2. Treat every project, every call, every piece of feedback as a learning opportunity
3. Reflect on what you’re learning and the process that you’re using
4. Proactively manage your time
5. Help support your future self
6. Aren’t too rigid in terms of how you do things and also your expectations of yourself

…then you will be a resilient but flexible Medical Writer – able to evolve with the world and your work.

You can download a PDF summary of everything that I’ve talked about today from the video description below, and there are also links to the other videos and podcasts and resources that I’ve mentioned.

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments, and also comment if there are any suggestions of other topics that you would like me to explore in future videos. I’d love to hear what you think.

If you found this video useful, please do like it and maybe share it with other Medical Writer friends.