Areas of practice

A reader chooses here by the area of the field the work belongs to. Each area has its own documents, readers, rules and ways of working. The competences every area shares are left to foundations: the science, the evidence, the language, writing for the reader, visual and spoken communication, making a document, the tools and the ethics of the work. The writer's working life, from building a career and freelancing to leading a team and the professional community, is left to profession.

• Regulatory writing — settling which framework a borderline product falls under; medicines, from the regulatory framework through clinical trials, marketing authorisation and pharmacovigilance to transparency and managing the documents; medical devices; and other regulated products such as cosmetics, chemicals and pesticides
• Publications — publication planning, reporting guidelines, journal articles, congress abstracts and books, getting published, open access and preprints, and research and publication integrity
• Medical communications and education — the communication with healthcare professionals the work serves: medical affairs and agency work in general, medicines information, curated research summaries, professional education, scientific meetings, consensus statements, and promotion and its rules
• Patient and public communication — documents for patients and trial participants, writing for the public, trust, hesitancy and misinformation, and patient partnerships
• Market access and health technology assessment — the economic and assessment evidence behind decisions about a population's care, and the value and reimbursement documents in which a health technology's value is argued and decided for those who pay for care
• Academic writing and clinical records — the documents researchers and clinicians write in their own research, study or patient care: funding proposals and grant applications, theses and laboratory reports, and clinical records
• Medical translation — meaning across languages, translating specialised texts, commissioning and running a translation, working as a translator, interpreting and language access, and the ethics of translation
• Veterinary medical writing — the work a veterinary writer does, veterinary science and evidence, communicating with animal owners, and authorising a veterinary medicine