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The job of a medical writer is to write high quality, scientific copies of communication that pharma companies send to healthcare professionals, letting them know about their new pharmaceutical drugs. This communication can be in the form of press releases, advertisements, reports and articles. This is a highly rewarding job for those that understand the world of medicine and possess excellent writing skills. If you are committed to your work and meet deadlines, you can make a lot of money. Read on to learn how to be a medical writer.
There are two types of skills that you need to acquire to become an efficient medical writer – scientific and artistic. Let us consider the two one by one.
Scientific skills
1. You need to know about the various concepts and terminologies related to medicines. However, you don’t need to be an expert in cardiac surgery because you may need to write on a variety of topics. A basic understanding of everything related to the medical field is essential.
2. A thorough understanding of the drug development process is a must for you. A lot of your writing will involve handling topics like clinical trials, drug safety and reports on clinical developments. Hence, you must know how drugs are manufactured.
3. You must be thorough with the various technical guidelines associated with the pharma companies. Topics like drug development and registration guidelines, regulatory submissions, reports of clinical trials and patient information are important for you to know.
4. Since medical writing involves publishing a lot of data, a thorough knowledge of statistics is important. You should be able to look at data and analyze it for your presentation. You should know topics like randomization schemes, regression analyses, confidence intervals and t-tests.
Artistic skills
1. You should be able to write well – this is the basic premise of medical writing. Because you will be writing stuffs that will be published in medical journals and other important publication and media, you cannot afford to make grammatical and sentence structure errors. Your basic errors could hit the brand value of the pharma company you wrote for.
2. You should be able to research online, find out relevant data and use it as reference. A lot of information is now available for free online and you should be able to use the correct keywords for finding it.
3. You should be ethical in your approach and not indulge in plagiarism. Copying and pasting from work already available online is a complete no-no.
No job is easy and the same applies to medical writing. To become an expert medical writer, you first need to make sure that you want to make a career in this field. There is enough information available for you to use. Put in the right effort and you should succeed.