Should I become a Medical Writer?

Hi, I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor. I became a Medical Writer way back in 2004, but at the time I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into.

I’d recently completed a degree in Neuroscience, and I knew that research wasn’t right for me, so I’d opted to look for literally any job that involved writing and would use my scientific background.

I was lucky though. Becoming a Medical Writer suited me down to the ground, but it’s not a job that suits everyone, even if MedComms is the right industry.

Over my next few videos, I’m going to be exploring the three main roles in MedComms, medical writing, client services, and editing. I’m going to look at each area in turn and break it down to consider the skills and experience that people in these roles need to have, but also the mindset they need and some of the tasks that they will do.

Now, do remember that some agencies will draw the line between these roles in different places, and some agencies have hybrid roles. It’s always worth asking about the team structures and how the roles break down when you are having an interview with an agency or having a chat with someone who works there.

Not every structure suits every Medical Writer, but how do you know if being a Medical Writer would suit you in the first place?

I’ve got six key questions to ask yourself, and I’m going to unpack the answers that you might give to help you decide if becoming a Medical Writer is right for you.

1. Is English your first language?

Being a native English speaker is definitely an advantage. The majority of Medical Writers I’ve worked with have been, but not all of them.

Now, most of the people I’ve worked with who weren’t native English speakers learnt English early on in their lives. People who have studied extensively in English speaking countries or who grew up speaking English alongside another language can go on to become successful Medical Writers because they’ve got the level of English that’s necessary.

You really do need to be completely fluent in both written and spoken English. The pharmaceutical industry is very international and we often work with client teams who all speak different languages, but we work together in English. Those clients rely on us to ensure all of the linguistic nuances are absolutely spot on in all of the content that we produce for them.

We also work with external experts as authors or speaker from across the globe, and again, they rely on us to take the meaning behind their actual words and turn it into accurate and elegant English.

We also need to be confident enough in our linguistic skills to be able to write for a wide range of different audiences.

In MedComms, we will often be writing for a healthcare professional audience, but this could be a primary care audience, it could be physiotherapists or nutritionists, it could be specialists in a certain therapy area, it could be the top tier experts at the cutting edge of their field.

We might also be writing for patients, their families, or caregivers or the general public.

Whichever we are writing for, we need to be able to use language that’s going to be accessible and appropriate for them.

And I also mentioned that we need to be confident in our spoken English too.

There are plenty of meetings in the life of a medical writer. Some will be internal at the agency that you work at, status meetings with the rest of your account team, talking about how everything is going on the projects that you’re all working on.

Some will be with clients, a briefing on a new project, updates on data releases, feedback on the current draft of an ongoing project.

Very new medical writers won’t usually be client-facing from Day One, but when you’re up to speed, you’ll be responsible for updating clients on your projects and making sure that you get all the information you need from them so that you can get the job done.

Medical Writers also attend more formal meetings, some with external experts, like roundtables or advisory boards, or internal client strategy meetings, and we need to write reports based on these discussions, so you need to be able to follow what’s said, which isn’t always easy, even for native English speakers, as there are likely to be multiple different accents as pharma is such an international world.

Sometimes these meetings will be recorded to support you writing the report, but you need to be confident with interpreting what’s said so that you can write it up accurately. And as you become more experienced, it’s likely that you’ll need to contribute to these meetings too, and maybe even facilitate them.

2. Do you like writing?

Writing is obviously a core part of being a Medical Writer, so this is important. There are plenty of projects that Medical Writers do that involve long-form writing, like publications for peer reviewed journals. However, Medical Writers also need to be good at presenting information visually, and this usually means being pretty comfortable in PowerPoint.

Medical Writers do a lot of work in PowerPoint. I have genuinely had dreams in PowerPoint.

We work on presentations for meetings, and there are a huge range of different types of meetings we might work on, but increasingly meeting reports are also done in PowerPoint too, because that’s most useful to our clients.

Gone are the days when you could send over a detailed 10 page Word document documenting the meeting and the client would read it through thoroughly.

These days, they want to see the highlights and the key actions presented visually so that they can present these to their team to take them through their next steps, or present them to their boss to show what an awesome meeting they’ve just run.

We also need to develop figures for journal articles, or visual or digital assets for websites or apps or training platforms.

We often work with Design or Digital professionals to help with this, so we need to be able to give them enough information so that they can do all the whizzy creative stuff (technical term), and we need to take into account the fact that they probably don’t have a science background.

We need to make sure that everything is going to be scientifically accurate and appropriate for the audience and the format that it’ll be presented in, so we need to be able to guide those supporting professionals in that process.

Medical Writers also need to be very organized as we often work on multiple projects, sometimes across several different accounts.

We generally work with client services or project management teams to support with this, and there’ll be more information on the kind of things that they do in my next video.

But we need to be on top of our own workloads. Our line managers will support with this, especially when we are new to the business, but we need to be able to prioritize our own work, meet our deadlines, and stick to the budgeted hours that we’ve been given for each task and more on that later.

3. Do you have a science degree?

A huge part of being a Medical Writer is picking up complex scientific information and being able to grasp the underlying concepts quickly and confidently is definitely necessary.

We need to be able to use the published literature, so search on PubMed or other academic databases, then filter through the search results to identify the relevant papers, and then read and interpret these appropriately to be able to use them in the content that we are developing.

We need to be able to understand the methods used in clinical trials, the patient populations enrolled in them, the endpoints that are measured, the statistical analyses of the data.

We also need to be able to grapple with the preclinical side of things too. The pathophysiology of our disease areas, the mechanism of action of our drugs, the biomarkers used to determine the effect of these drugs at a molecular or cellular level.

If you don’t have a science degree, this will be tough, but that doesn’t mean that MedComms isn’t right for you. Look out for my next few videos because you might be suited better to a role in client services or editorial.

And not all science degrees are the same. I’ve known people to go into medical writing with first degrees in things like physics and psychology, and they’ve done well, but I don’t think those are an ideal background.

I would say any kind of life sciences or biomedical degree would be the best background for a Medical Writer, and this includes medical or pharmacy qualifications, and I’ve also known several vets who’ve gone on to become Medical Writers.

Basically, if your degree has given you a good understanding of human or animal physiology, including genetics, immunology, and potentially pharmacology, you’ll be on the right track.

Another question that often comes up is whether you need to have a PhD to be a Medical Writer, and I always say, ‘I hope not, because I don’t have one!’

My highest degree is a BSc and that has never held me back.

Some agencies might require higher degrees, but most don’t. If you’re concerned about this, just ask them.

I think part of the question though, about whether people have PhDs, is actually about whether they have relevant work experience following their first degree.

Someone who has a PhD will have worked autonomously within a team, prioritizing their workload, figuring out the solutions to problems that crop up. These are all useful, transferrable skills that someone straight from uni may not have had as much experience with.

That’s why people with work experience in related fields post-uni, like journal or academic publishing, are also great candidates for a move to become a Medical Writer, even if they don’t have higher qualifications.

It might be harder to get a job as a Medical Writer straight out of a first degree because you don’t have the same level of broader work experience, but it’s not impossible.

Understanding the areas where you have less experience will help you find ways to fill those gaps, and being a proactive problem solver will get you a long way in MedComms.

It will also mean you can think about the experiences that you do have, maybe from your degree, maybe from other activities like volunteering or other work experience, being involved in university societies or the Students’ Union, and see how you can demonstrate those transferable skills in other ways.

But whether or not you have a PhD, anybody new to MedComms will start off at the same level. Usually this might be Associate medical Writer or a job title that’s specific to the training scheme run by the agency that you’ve joined.

Having a PhD or post-doc experience doesn’t usually mean that you can skip the bottom rung and come in as a Senior Medical Writer or something.

There’s an awful lot to learn about MedComms and how to be a Medical Writer that is covered by these more junior roles. Without the industry specific experience, it isn’t possible to bypass them.

4. Do you have an eye for detail?

Accuracy is crucial in medical writing. If we make a mistake and include something inaccurate in a project, this could have real consequences for patients’ lives.

It’s not easy. We often work with complex data, and it might be data that isn’t finalized. We will often work on things like abstracts for submission to medical congresses before the clinical study report for the trial has been finalized, meaning we are working on raw data tables generated by the stats team.

And that team is only human, often working on huge data stats under extraordinary pressure to meet tight timelines, and that means very occasionally that errors creep in.

As Medical Writers, we are part of the safety net to make sure that any errors are caught and corrected before the data are published.

Sometimes that means we often get frequent data updates and we need to make sure that we are using the updated data, even if that means we only actually need to change one decimal point for one outcome.

We also have to provide marked-up reference packs for many projects as a crucial part of our clients’ compliance processes.

We have to mark up the relevant section of each reference we are using to support our work, or the specific data tables or figures that we’re using from a clinical study report, so that reviewers can quickly check the accuracy and the interpretation to make sure that it’s appropriate and complies with all the relevant legal, regulatory, and compliance guidelines that apply.

Data checking is also a core part of internal quality control processes within agencies. So whenever we write content, someone else will need to data check every data point, every figure, or table, every statement against the supporting evidence.

It’s very common for writers to do this for each other’s work. You’ll brief a colleague to data check your work, but you’ll also need to meticulously check work for other people.

Now, this is something that Editors sometimes do – different agencies have different processes – but I can pretty much guarantee that as a Medical Writer, at some point you will have to data check work, even if the Editors normally do it. There are times when we all have to pitch in, and that’s part of working as a team in MedComms.

There are also other types of detail that we need to master as Medical Writers.

Obviously, as professional writers, we need to be experts in the use of language, making sure all the grammatical details are correct, the words we’re using are spelled correctly and also consistently as there are sometimes different options, particularly between US and UK English.

We might also need to consider the formatting details like text styles for headers and subheaders. Depending on the type of project that we’re working on, we may need to use consistent colours or fonts for different things, and this becomes particularly crucial when we’re working on anything visual like PowerPoint slides.

5. Are you an intellectual magpie?

I see the magpie as the spirit animal of Medical Writers.

The way they are curious and interested in everything. They’re inventive problem solvers, and they’ve got an incredible capacity for spotting gems amongst the undergrowth. All these things epitomize the Medical Writer mindset.

Let’s dig into this a bit more.

Curiosity and a love of learning are integral to the Medical Writer mindset. Over our careers. We could work on, any drug in any therapy area, and what we work on is determined by the accounts that our agency has. We don’t get to choose that.

We usually will have some input into the accounts that we are assigned, but not always. Sometimes we have to work on the account where there’s a gap. And often, but not always, we’ll be working across two or three different accounts, maybe even more if they’re very small.

Agencies need to make sure that they can cover all of the work across all of the accounts and projects, and they need to make sure that nobody is sitting around doing nothing.

They make their money by selling their team’s time, so resource allocation is very tightly managed to make sure that everyone always has something on the go at all times.

And that may mean you are switching between several different projects on very different accounts during the course of a working day.

Medical writing suits people who relish this challenge. We have to be flexible and versatile and find that exciting and motivating rather than daunting.

I’ve always loved the variety in MedComms and the different types of writing we do as Medical Writers, and I find it really suits my writing process.

I can’t work all day on one thing – I run out of steam after a couple of hours, so always having something else I can switch to, even if that’s just a different part of the project, means I get more done in the long-run.

But this means that medical writing doesn’t suit people who want to become an expert in one area, whether that’s only working on one type of writing or one therapy area.

If that sounds like you, then MedComms is probably not the right place for you.

Another aspect of being an intellectual magpie is being able to spot the gems in the data.

We need to think about the project that we’re working on and understand what’s important by considering the project’s objective, the audience we’re communicating with and the source material we have.

What’s clinically significant? What differentiates this data from competitor data? What are the unmet needs currently faced by our audience and the patients that they’re treating? What is our client trying to communicate to that audience?

We have to sift through the available information quickly and efficiently using those questions to guide us to interpret what we find in the right way and include it in our project in the right way for our audience.

And this brings me onto the last aspect of being a medical writer that I want to consider.

6. Can you avoid research rabbit holes?

As Medical Writers, we have to make sure we channel our curiosity really carefully rather than letting it take over, which can lead to falling down research rabbit holes.

This can be a really tricky thing to judge, but think about it from a business perspective.

Every project we do will have a budget, and that budget is created by working out how many hours each task will need, and who will be doing that task as each role will have its own hourly or daily rate set by the agency.

When we get started, it can feel like we need to understand everything about a drug or a disease before we can get started on the writing.

But firstly, that’s impossible. And secondly, if we try to do that, we’ll use all of our budgeted time for the whole project, just on background research and never get round to any writing.

So whenever we start a project, we need to think about the audience that we’re writing for and exactly what we’re trying to communicate with them – the project’s objective – this will keep us focused so that we don’t go beyond the hours allocated to research in our project’s budget.

But in a broader sense, avoiding research rabbit holes means that we need to develop tools and processes so that we can quickly get up to speed whenever we start working on a new drug or a new therapy area.

Again, this doesn’t mean we have to become an overnight expert and know everything about it.

It means we have to become an expert in telling the difference between things that are interesting but not helpful for the project, and things that are useful and relevant.

We also have to be disciplined enough to stop reading when we find something that isn’t useful, even if it’s fascinating, and refocus on finding the things that will be relevant.

This can be a real challenge even for experienced writers, but we are more likely to be successful if it’s something we’re aware.

Download the PDF summary

So should you become a Medical Writer? If: 

1. You are confident in your written and spoken English
2. You enjoy writing but also enjoy creating other types of content
3. You have a strong science background and potentially have a PhD or work experience in a related industry like academic publishing
4. You have an eye for detail, including data accuracy but also the visual consistency of your work
5. You’re an intellectual magpie who relishes the thought of working on a huge variety of different topics
6. And you have the discipline to avoid falling down research rabbit holes, even if you’re faced with information that is absolutely fascinating

…then yes, I think becoming a Medical Writer could be the career for you.

How exciting!

You can download a PDF summary of all of the points that I’ve covered, which could be really useful when preparing for applying for jobs as a Medical Writer, from the video description below.

And during that application process, you’ll almost certainly have to do a writing test, so check out my previous video giving my top tips to make your writing test stand out.

If you found this video helpful, then please hit the like button and do add any questions that you have to the comments and I’ll get back to you.

I’d also love to hear any suggestions you have for future videos, so add them to the comments too.