Why sustainability is a medical writer's professional duty
Whether sustainability is a medical writer's business at all, beyond private conviction, and how far the profession's position on that moved between 2020 and 2024, is the question this leaf answers. What the duty asks of a writer's own practice is in cutting the footprint of your own working practice, the documents it reaches in documents that sustainability generates, and the ways into the work in taking up sustainability work as a medical writer.
A professional duty to be informed
The position was first stated at EMWA's October 2020 webinar "Sustainability Demystified", in two parts: Achim Schneider's introduction to the subject, and a presentation of the association's then newly founded sustainability special interest group by its co-founder Karola Krauss, at that point EMWA's vice-president. The recording had no supplied captions, so its transcript was generated locally and quality-checked programmatically rather than proofread; proper names, figures and occasional clauses in it are approximate, and Krauss's surname is itself rendered two different ways. Damaged passages are flagged where they are used. Everything here from that webinar describes the position in October 2020, including the group's plans, which were plans at that date rather than commitments met.
The group's stated sequence was to gather information and do the science first — how the goals affect the individual medical writer, how they affect the association as a not-for-profit, how the healthcare industry responds to and implements them, and how regulatory bodies and governmental agencies take them on — publish it, and only then promote and encourage action. Its most substantial ambition for the profession was to investigate how medical writing is done in the context of the goals and to produce educational and training material from it, along with a resource centre on the association's website. Starting and running a special interest group covers how the group organised that programme.
Krauss closes on the line that gives the topic its standard: how far you implement sustainability in your own life may be a private matter, but it is a professional duty to at least get informed about the sustainable development goals. The session ran over time, and the moderator referred the remaining audience questions to the group directly rather than taking them, raising a further online session as a possibility; the record therefore stops with those questions unanswered.
The group's 2021 statement goes further than informing oneself. Sustainability, in its words, is not just a lifestyle choice but a professional responsibility of each and everyone: as actors in a healthcare sector known for its considerable carbon footprint, clinical researchers and medical communicators have the responsibility to support and steer the industry towards sustainability through their personal and professional activities, and the profession should be in the front line supporting the development goals. The March 2021 issue of Medical Writing (volume 30, number 1, on social media) was admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair; its known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text.
The association put its name to the same position publicly in September 2021, when more than 200 health journals simultaneously published an editorial calling for emergency action to limit global temperature increases, restore biodiversity and protect health. EMWA's journal, with the endorsement of the executive committee and the support of the sustainability group, declared full support for it and reprinted it in the March 2022 issue under its Creative Commons Attribution licence; the editorial was commissioned and not externally peer reviewed. The March 2022 issue of Medical Writing (volume 31, number 1, on sustainable communications) was admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair; its known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text. The same issue developed the professional argument in two directions a writer can act on: the footprint of trials in the carbon footprint of clinical trials, and the waste of research that is never used or shared in preventing research waste, whose authors argue that writers are well positioned to reduce both.
Read how far the field had moved
Four years later the same group ran an expert seminar on sustainability in healthcare, published to the association's seminar archive as a 2024 recording. Four invited speakers — Amy Booth, a University of Oxford researcher on the pharmaceutical supply chain's carbon footprint; David, who heads environmental health and safety, sustainability and business continuity for Thermo Fisher Scientific's clinical research group; Fred, a public and environmental health professor at a South African university of technology; and Claudia, a regulatory affairs director at AstraZeneca — were joined for a closing panel by two medical-communications practitioners: Gemma Rogers, who has spent more than fourteen years in medical communications and leads global teams across publication planning, digital, patient-centric and educational content, and Raquel, a regulatory writer of fifteen years' standing who is the association's journal editor-in-chief and a co-founder of both its medical-devices and its sustainability groups. Its record is Vimeo's uncorrected automatic captioning, so figures and organisation names in it are approximate and most surnames are rendered several different ways; where the transcript leaves a handover unclear the claim is left unattributed below. Everything from it describes the position in late 2024. The subject matter behind it — what healthcare's footprint is made of, and what the terms of art now mean — is in sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Sarah Kabani's written report of the same seminar, in the Crofter column of EMWA's March 2025 issue, places it at the hybrid 58th conference in November 2024 as the group's second expert seminar series, with six panellists, its recording to be made available to members on the group's pages; the column's editors introduce it as offering glimpses of hope against the background of the climate crisis, with writers emerging as pivotal in communicating healthcare's environmental impact. The report gives the full names the captions garble: David Lumby of PPD, Thermo Fisher Scientific's clinical research group; Gomotsegang Fred Molelekwa of Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa; and Claudia Percivalle of AstraZeneca. The March 2025 issue of Medical Writing (volume 34, number 1, on rare diseases) drawn on here was admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair; its known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text.
Where the 2024 panel put its optimism is a fair statement of what had changed in four years, and it is about mainstreaming rather than about targets. Sustainability had stopped being something only front-runners do; on one panellist's account there is less explaining of the problem to be done every year, which leaves more room for looking at solutions. What the word is taken to encompass had broadened with it — Gemma Rogers' point is that general conversation now takes in water debt and biodiversity alongside carbon footprint, where those were niche, and that public pressure builds as it does. Inside organisations the shift the panel named is structural: people volunteering their own time because they already regard it as important, and asking what they personally can do; governments setting regulations that can be followed; companies making commitments and reporting against them; and the corporate social responsibility function moving out of public affairs into operations and procurement, where it changes what gets bought. The answer offered to the individual version of the question is that enough people asking it is what gets noticed by those able to turn it into regulation or guidance, with coalitions of companies, universities and non-profit organisations as the visible form of the same thing. Except where a speaker is named here, the transcript does not settle which panellist gave which of those answers, so they are recorded as the panel's.
Kabani's written report adds two grounds the 2024 panel gave for optimism: Booth found the people she works with increasingly familiar with the terminology and the issues, a sign that messaging about green initiatives was reaching ever broader audiences, and Molelekwa gave examples of green energy initiatives in hospitals and universities in Africa. The panel also pointed to My Green Lab's freezer challenge, open to laboratories of all sizes in 2025, as a motivator to audit freezer contents and save energy, and the seminar closed with Catarina Leitao, a group member and co-host, quoting Jane Goodall on the need for compassion for future generations as well as intelligence.