Taking up sustainability work as a medical writer
How a medical writer who wants to do more than reduce a personal footprint takes up sustainability work — starting a team at work, communicating for a small nonprofit, volunteering — and what that work gives back to the writing is the question this leaf answers. Why the profession treats the subject as a duty is in why sustainability is a medical writer's professional duty, and cutting the footprint of the work itself in cutting the footprint of your own working practice.
Start a sustainability team where you work
Sarah Kabani's account in EMWA's December 2023 Crofter column starts from a medical writer who felt she had no capacity to change sustainability practice at work. A molecular biologist turned medical writer at a French teaching hospital, CHU Nîmes, she had focused on her personal footprint — cycling to work, choosing vegetarian meals, taking the train to conferences even from the south of France to Prague — against a background of eco-anxiety and powerlessness, until colleagues who had noticed those habits started conversations about climate change that grew into a team with a common interest and a range of backgrounds. With researchers in it, research was the obvious next step. The column's editor, Kimi Uegaki, sets it against a divide she heard described at the Dutch Green Health Festival: people who think about healthcare sustainability as environmental impact and people who think about it as future-proofing affordability and access to resources, whose discussions derail when the difference goes unrecognised — her hope being that both sides come to see it as and-and rather than or-or, which is what the Nîmes projects claim to show. The December 2023 issue of Medical Writing (volume 32, number 4) 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 first project came from the hospital pharmacy. Virginie Chasseigne, a hospital pharmacist experienced in managing sterilisable and implantable devices, had seen many ways to cut waste in the operating room; a preliminary study measured it, and her DURABLOC project broadened the range of eco-friendly actions there, with 13 initiatives chosen from staff surveys, literature reviews and suggestions from professional societies. Sihame Chkair, a health economist, was asked to perform the economic analysis, and Kabani joined at the publication stage. The group then evaluated switching from single-use to reusable laryngoscope blades with a life-cycle assessment — measuring the ecological impact from cradle to grave, through the materials, the resources and chemicals of manufacture, transport and disposal — which favoured the reusable blades on every ecological indicator, from carbon dioxide emissions to toxic chemical production and water use, after as few as three uses, with savings estimated at around €5,800 a year. That evidence led the anaesthetists, the sterilisation unit manager and the purchasing department to make the switch; the project was led entirely by the pharmacy team without an institutional request, and the working group now meets every two months with different departments to find processes staff think could be greener.
The health economist is what makes such a project persuasive, in her account: many organisations want to lower their environmental impact, but all want to save money, and budget constraints weigh heavily; the Nîmes studies showed savings alongside the ecological gains, but that is not always so, and where an action costs money the initial cost has to be calculated so the decision-maker is fully informed. The team went on to a collaboration with a biostatistician on the economics of mitigation for a hospital that had been flooded, a mixed-methods study of extreme heat and emergency-room management comparing focus groups before and after a summer and the effect of temperature on admissions and ambulance call-outs, and a Horizon Europe grant application on water security, PHOENIX 2, for which it found European partners through contacts of contacts and cold calls and a South African partner through an earlier Crofter interview and the association's sustainability special interest group. The application passed the first round and failed in the final one, but the collaboration continued, and the special interest group planned a portal where researchers interested in sustainability could find one another. The article says the grant team came from five countries and then lists six.
Her conclusions are addressed to the writer who feels powerless. None of them was formally trained in sustainability, and teamwork carried them from concerned citizens with climate anxiety to projects at several stages with an international team in a couple of years; other hospitals have saved time and money with modest changes started by staff, as reported from the 2023 Royal College of Physicians conference, from switching away from prepackaged saline to telemedicine for stable patients. The pitch to an employer is that such projects often save money and produce publications as well as environmental benefits, and the first step can be a chat by the coffee machine.
Communicate sustainable development from a small nonprofit
Nonprofit communication about sustainability is a different job from the corporate kind, and EMWA's sustainability column, The Crofter, gave it an account in March 2024. Its editor, Kimi Uegaki, credits the development goals with showing that sustainability extends beyond climate change to the links between environmental, social — health included — and economic issues. Nicole Bezuidenhout, a medical writer and the journal's digital communication editor, wrote with Valeria Santoro and Jeniffer Muganda about Lightup Impact, an online community of 125 early-stage, locally led nonprofits working on gender and health in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, which addresses seven of the goals — no poverty, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, decent work and economic growth, reduced inequalities, and partnership for the goals — and follows the #ShiftThePower movement of moving power from external agencies to local people. Its core team was five people, one of them a communications professional, with part-time volunteers in design, legal and finance. The March 2024 issue of Medical Writing (volume 33, number 1, on translation) 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.
Their table sets nonprofit against for-profit communication on five points: a nonprofit's messages are driven by its mission, values and intended social change rather than by products, competitive advantage and customer benefit; it engages donors, volunteers, beneficiaries and communities to build trust and support rather than customers, shareholders and employees; it works on small budgets from donations, grants and fundraising, and its communication has to inspire support, where a company's promotes sales; it measures success by impact on its mission — lives improved, communities served — rather than revenue and market share; and it takes a long view, educating the public about systemic problems and advocating for policy, where a company's communication follows short-term financial goals. The difficulties they list are limited resources, engaging very diverse stakeholders, complex messaging on a subject many do not accept and that differs between communities, balancing talk of impact against talk of overheads that no one wants to hear about, building and keeping trust through authenticity, transparency, accountability and consistency, keeping up with a fast-moving field, and measuring impact that is often qualitative, which also makes grant applications and reports to funders harder.
Their own practice answers those in kind. The tone is young, creative and inspiring for the grassroots leaders at the centre of the strategy, and casual, inclusive, simple and positive for everyone; the organisation co-hosted its 2023 conference with the East African Philanthropy Network, formed a community-elected founder committee that moderated panels and even took over the Instagram account for a day, and moved its headquarters to Eldoret, Kenya, to meet members in person. Social media is its cheapest way to reach most stakeholders, a WhatsApp group carries news, events and grant opportunities to members, and email, calls, community meetups, events, site visits, surveys and focus groups serve both relationships and needs assessments — with the stated rule that gathering feedback is not enough without listening and changing. Trust rests on frequent communication, publishing annual, event and financial reports, and a blog posted at least monthly. In 2023 it onboarded 50 grassroots organisations, 50% more than in 2022, hosted 154 conference participants, drew over 6,000 visitors to its redesigned website, raised €22,000 through two crowdfunding campaigns and doubled its financial capacity, and it planned skills programmes for members in grant proposal writing, report writing, websites, digital marketing and visual content.
Bezuidenhout's interview in the same column gives the writer's side. She began volunteering in 2021, offering communications support after a fundraiser for a cervical-cancer charity co-founded by Santoro, and grew from one or two blog posts a year to content editor across the blog, website and email, annual and event reports, and communication and content strategy. Her scientific, medical and regulatory knowledge was not needed, but her writing and editing, attention to detail, ability to create and follow guidelines, and understanding of platforms and digital marketing were; in return she learned tools for project management, content management and graphic design, wrote more creatively, and used that experience at her day job for a client newsletter and marketing content, along with soft skills such as delegation, empathy and humility. Asked about resistance, she named not understanding sustainable development — meeting present needs without compromising future generations, balancing economic growth, environmental care and social well-being — not seeing it as necessary, and lack of resources; for grassroots organisations the barriers were weak integration into national and regional development policy, few support networks, and too little visibility and credibility to secure funding. She invited medical writers to help such nonprofits with websites and design, proposal and grant writing, communication strategy and writing skills.
Count what sustainability work teaches a writer
The Crofter column changed hands in June 2024 — Louisa Ludwig-Begall and Sarah Kabani took over as co-editors — and its first column under them was Catarina Leitão's account of what volunteering for sustainability taught a medical writer. A medical writer at Evidenze in Lisbon who volunteers with the Portuguese NGOs Ocean Alive and Circular Economy Portugal, where she chairs the general assembly board, she was moved to act by plastic waste on Costa Rican beaches in December 2015, cleaned riverbanks and raised awareness of plastics in the ocean, then worked at a repair café and on an urban agroforest; her research convinced her that many current solutions relieve one problem by aggravating another. The June 2024 issue of Medical Writing (volume 33, number 2, on soft skills for medical writers) 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.
Her interview in the same column with Cátia Godinho, who conceived the Beautiful Flower Breathes project, shows the social side. Begun in November 2018 with funding from the Municipality of Lisbon on a former dumpsite in the Campolide parish, the urban agroforest uses syntropic agriculture, or successional agroforestry, developed by Ernst Götsch, which interplants crops with trees and shrubs so that sun-loving crops give way to shade-adapted ones as saplings grow, without chemicals or fertilisers; about 30 volunteers took weeks to clear the land. Godinho reports year-round carbon sequestration, but above all a sense of belonging and less loneliness in a neglected neighbourhood, retirees and children gardening together, local guardians against fly-tipping, and vegetables for residents who lost income in the pandemic; the community has since claimed ownership. Leitão found that weekends clearing the land dispelled the mental fatigue of intense medical writing work, has since built walks in nature into her routine, and cites studies associating contact with nature, urban nature included, with less stress, depression, anxiety and chronic pain and better mood, cognition, creativity and sleep.
Louisa Ludwig-Begall, co-editor of The Crofter, EMWA's sustainability column, gave her own origin story in it in September 2024. As one of a team of virologists at the University of Liège she worked from 2020 on decontaminating face masks and respirators for reuse — the science is in weighing reuse against single use in healthcare — and the team came increasingly to prioritise sustainable and equitable methods. After her postdoc ended in 2023 she became a medical writer, and told the story to members of the sustainability special interest group at her first EMWA conference, in Prague. The September 2024 issue of Medical Writing (volume 33, number 3, on clinical trial transparency and disclosure) 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.
She credits the work with preparing her for medical writing in four ways. Acting throughout as the team's unofficial medical writer, she learned to tackle and write about new and unfamiliar topics; working with interdisciplinary and international teams was an object lesson in adapting a message to its audience; sustainability ties many disciplines together, which opened new collaborations, funding options and journals to publish in — a way to broaden a writing portfolio; and it brought her a group of sustainability enthusiasts from whom she keeps learning about sustainability and medical writing. She shares the story in the hope of emboldening other medical writers to explore sustainability and join the group.