The work a veterinary writer does
What documents veterinary writing produces, from the regulatory dossier to consumer copy, which neighbouring regulatory fields are offered to the same writer, and which employers commission the work. How the writing itself differs once the patient is an animal is in what changes when the patient is an animal, the route in is in getting into veterinary medical writing, and the public relations and comics that reach owners directly are in reaching animal owners and the public.
Expect regulatory writing to supply the largest share
Regulatory writing supplies the largest share, Sandra Götsch-Schmidt says in an undated EMWA webinar: the critical summaries and other content of the veterinary dossier, and the product-information texts that go with it.
The webinar's automatic Whisper transcript was selectively quality-checked rather than fully proofread, so several proper names arrive garbled — the Eudralex volumes, the EMA website, a template family — and are read from context here rather than quoted.
Manufacturers of veterinary medicinal products must establish and maintain pharmacovigilance as manufacturers of human medicines do, and periodic safety update reports are part of that obligation.
Clinical trial documents — protocols and study reports — are written for veterinary products as for human ones. Many veterinary trials are run in cooperation with universities or in university facilities, and larger companies run them at their own research centres; Götsch-Schmidt's own first study report came from an anthelmintic trial in piglets conducted during her doctorate at a university parasitology institute. A writer who already produces protocols and study reports can apply that work directly to veterinary research.
The regulatory route looks different again outside Europe. Nicola Parry, a freelance medical writer in the United States who is also a veterinarian board-certified by the American College of Veterinary Pathologists, set it out in her 2014 survey of the field. In the United States an animal drug proceeds through a process parallel to the human one: a company submits a New Animal Drug Application to the Office of New Animal Drug Evaluation within the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine, containing the supporting data that establish effectiveness and safety together with information on chemical components and pharmacology, and an Investigational New Animal Drug submission is required where an unapproved new animal drug will be used for research, covering the discovery phases, the components and intended use, laboratory animal safety and efficacy data, and the results of any pilot studies. Companies producing animal drugs often already have regulatory writers on staff, which is why Parry reads the opening as belonging particularly to writers with a veterinary background.
A 2019 field guide sorts the same range by what governs it. Cemile Jakupoglu, trained in veterinary medicine and working as a veterinary regulatory affairs manager, and Götsch-Schmidt wrote it for EMWA's December 2019 issue. The December 2019 issue was admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair, and its known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text. Veterinary writing is regulatory and non-regulatory, scientific and communication writing, in several languages: regulatory documents and scientific research are normally written in English, while national law may require other languages for documents such as requests for animal testing, where veterinarians act as custodians of animal welfare, and local languages are also needed for marketing communications and for study plans read by assessors who do not work in English. Regulatory writing covers the marketing authorisation of pharmaceuticals, vaccines, feed additives and medicated feed, and can extend to the evaluation of chemicals, biocides and plant protection products, which overlaps with the work of toxicologists; a veterinary pharmaceutical reaches the market under the European Medicines Agency's rules and a feed additive under the European Food Safety Authority's, and toxicological studies in laboratory animals, from acute toxicity to long-term carcinogenicity, follow the OECD test guidelines. Studies therefore run under different standards: good scientific practice for academic and early development work, good clinical practice under VICH GL9 for pivotal trials in the target species, and good laboratory practice for toxicology and residue studies. Human and environmental safety run through all of it under the One Health concept, which guides the writing of veterinary submission dossiers — residues in the environment and in edible tissues, and antimicrobial resistance, are evaluated for their impact on human safety — and brings in experts in ecotoxicology, analytical chemistry and microbiology. The new regulation's product database adds a data role: the task force on substance, product, organisation and referential master data, set up for human medicines, was extended to veterinary stakeholders, which the authors read as future work for writers as data managers.
Know the neighbouring regulatory fields
Several adjacent regulatory fields sit close enough to be offered to the same writer, and two of them are routinely confused. From a regulatory point of view pesticides protect plants or crops from pests and diseases or control weeds, while biocides control harmful or unwanted organisms by chemical or biological means — in surroundings such as houses and stables, by impregnating clothes or parasite barrier nets, or applied directly to human skin — with disinfectants, wood preservatives and insect repellents the common examples; the two are governed by separate European legislation, and pesticide authorisation dossiers covers the pesticide side. Between veterinary biocidal products and antiparasitic products or disinfectants used on animals or in animal husbandry there is a genuine grey area, where a product can be registered under the animal health rules or the biocides rules and the choice often turns on the registering company's focus and the expertise of its regulatory affairs department. The term medical device is not established for veterinary use in the EU and there is no European registration procedure for such products, whereas in the United States they exist as veterinary devices regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Preparing pharmacovigilance documents is a further adjacent field, and where it sits varies: pharmacovigilance may be part of regulatory affairs, standalone, or integrated into clinical development.
Find work in research, publishing and commerce
Research settings — academia, government institutions and contract research organisations — carry work of a different kind. A writer can help veterinary clinicians and researchers produce clinical or scientific research papers, literature reviews, abstracts and conference posters, and help develop grant proposals to fund studies. In contract research the work is the nonclinical phase: before a new drug can be tested in the target species it undergoes testing in vitro and in vivo in suitable animal models, generating pharmacological data on dosing, safety and efficacy, and a writer develops the documents from those data that let the regulators assess whether the drug is suitable for testing in its target species.
Editorial posts at peer-reviewed veterinary and scientific journals — editor-in-chief, managing editor, manuscript editor — are a further route, and one with a public-facing rationale: publication planning in veterinary journals increasingly follows the World Association of Medical Editors' guidance on editorial independence and the Committee on Publication Ethics code of good publication practice, which gives a writer a part to play in developing and editing clinical publications closely with authors. Trade publications in print and online are numerous in the profession and can be a lucrative niche for a freelance with a veterinary background.
On the commercial side, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies need writers for the communication strategy and publication plan that runs alongside clinical development and supports commercialisation — introducing the drug to veterinarians and keeping it on their radar through its lifecycle — and the same writers may track competitors developing drugs in the same therapeutic area and monitor their communication and publication activity, as well as disseminating clinical and scientific data at conferences and in journals.
Reach owners and the public
Beyond the regulatory core, promotional and marketing material, translations, and publications or articles for magazines and web pages are all potential work, and several of these are open to a general medical writer with no particular qualification in the animal field. Medical advertising covers the approval regime those materials sit under.
Non-scientific work reaches consumers directly and is the part most open to a writer without a veterinary qualification. Promotional or marketing writing covers journal advertisements, direct-to-consumer material and marketing brochures for veterinarians, and the buyers include pharmaceutical and pet insurance companies communicating with farmers and with owners of pets or competition animals, as well as pet food companies, veterinary clinics, and boarding kennels and catteries, in print and on the web. Mainstream magazines and trade publications for the pet and animal industry are written at consumer level, which is what makes them open to writers without a veterinary background, and they can lead to regular long-term freelance assignments and serve as a stepping stone into other areas of the field.
Translation runs alongside all of it, on both the professional and the consumer side, and veterinary translation covers what the specialism asks of whoever does it.
Find the work in veterinary regulatory affairs, and the niche through its interest group
The employers are recognisable once you know what to look for. Cemile Jakupoglu's February 2021 EMWA webinar describes her own since 2008: a regulatory affairs company, and within it a subsidiary serving the veterinary pharmaceutical industry, whose business is getting veterinary pharmaceuticals and other veterinary products onto the market — writing the dossiers for marketing authorisations and supporting the strategy behind them. She presented as an association member speaking to a personal interest rather than for that company, and her recording carries a locally generated Whisper transcript that was selectively checked rather than fully proofread, so company and organisation names in it are approximate.
The compensation for the specialism's narrowness is its range. A veterinarian works across a very broad and diverse set of species, diseases and problems, which is what makes the case material interesting and gives a writer in the field more subjects than a single-indication human practice offers.
The association's veterinary special interest group is the practical way in, and starting and running a special interest group records how it was run and who could attend it. Publishing is the other route, and the one a writer without a veterinary degree can act on: case reports covers what a veterinary case report contains and how to get a practising clinician to write one.