Ethics of the work

A reader chooses here by the obligation a writer carries in any area: how to work through an ethical situation, the professional codes that set a writer's standards, the information they are trusted with, the culture of the workplace, or equity and bias. The obligations that belong to one area of practice are left to that area: protecting the people research is done on to research ethics and ethics review, making trials and their data public to transparency and disclosure, the honesty and credit of the published record to research and publication integrity, industry's dealings with health professionals to promotion and its rules, the ethics of an assessment to ethics in health technology assessment, and a translator's obligations to the ethics of medical translation. The obligations that come with AI are left to using AI responsibly.

• Working through an ethical situation — a five-step process for deciding what to do once something is wrong, its teaching case, and the tactics for raising a concern with a client
• Professional codes of ethics for medical writers — what AMWA's code says and how it was written and revised, why a profession keeps a code, and the neighbouring professions' codes
• Confidentiality and data protection — a patient's identity in what is published, data protection in clinical research, and human-centric control of health data
• Equity and bias — equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging in medical communications, gender bias in science and medicine, and writing about health disparities
• Building an ethical workplace culture — trust and integrity as the ground of a culture, the human resources function's part in it, social media in hiring and at work, misconduct, and how a culture is improved