Hi, I’m Virginia. I’m a UK registered pharmacist since 2014 and I’ve been a medical writer and content creator since 2020. So, in this video I want to answer the question which somebody sent into me which is how do you become a medical writer if you are a UK medical doctor. So, this is not the same as a doctor who has a PhD. This is someone who is treating patients. So, they’re a medical doctor.
And I would say that the first thing you need to do is decide what type of medical writing you want to do. So broadly these are in three different categories. So you’ve got kind of technical medical writing which is more regulatory medical writing and you’re trying to deal with clinical trials and also get medicines from the research process through to the approval process. So then it could be marketed and help people with their health. And then the second type is kind of educational medical writing. And this is when you are either producing educational materials, maybe courses or leaflets or short quizzes. And you are producing them for fellow healthare professionals or maybe even for students that are studying in school and maybe even for patients as well.
Or maybe you are going to be writing creative things. So creative medical writing is a third type and I would say that’s more kind of like marketing and journalism and also maybe social media posts. So once again marketing is not a bad thing. It’s usually when you’re trying to persuade someone to do something and that could either be, you know, maybe changing a habit. So we talk a lot about behavioral change. And then maybe you’re trying to get them to donate to a good cause or maybe book an appointment for like screening service to detect cancer or other things. So marketing is not just about selling.
So I would say first of all, pick the type of medical writing that you want to do. Second of all, create some writing samples. Now I do have a free course which is medical writing skills for beginners. And so that’s probably the easiest way to create some free samples. And if you want me to have a look at your portfolio when you create your free samples, then I would say have a look at my course on how to create a medical writing portfolio and then I can give you my opinion on what you’ve written and then hopefully make sure that you’re setting yourself up for success so that you can actually then send that portfolio to a potential client.
So that brings me on to my next point. So, how do you find clients if you want to become a medical writer? So, as a medical doctor, you’ve got a bit of an advantage over other people who are applying for medical writing positions because you’ve got that medical knowledge and clinical background and you’ve also got that real life experience with patients. So, you’ve got a unique perspective on how to help them. And also you can include your experiences of treating patients in your writing as well which is also unique. And so that’s one of the reasons why I got my very first job as a medical writer is because of my background as a pharmacist and working for about six to seven years as a community pharmacist in London in various different pharmacies and various different roles and that my kind of unique positioning was in travel health. And so I got into the online world of online doctors, where people are reading information and then they are filling out questionnaires or they’re having a consultation with a doctor and then they’re getting the prescription sent to them maybe through the post to their home. And so all of that information is something that you can write and look at and also maybe you can edit as well.
So there are opportunities for you to review health information. So sometimes medical writing might not start with writing. It might start with actually reviewing which is how I got started as well. And I didn’t get paid very much because I wasn’t aware of how much I could get paid. And now I know very well that it’s a lot more than I thought. So I would say that as a doctor you can charge probably about £50 per hour or I’ve seen you know around £400 per day as a doctor as well. So that’s a 7 hour work day. And I would say that it is worth kind of reaching out to people on LinkedIn to fellow medical writers, but also possibly recruiters who can find a job for you if that’s something that you want to do full-time. But if you kind of want to do it part-time, maybe you want to do less clinical work as a doctor because maybe you are trying to plan for a family or maybe you are looking to spend less time in hospital because you find it tiring or you don’t want to do the shift work which is completely understandable.
So, especially speaking from experience when I was a younger pharmacist, I could stand in the pharmacy all day, you know, 10 hours per day. And then kind of like in my sixth or seventh year as a pharmacist, I’m, you know, getting into my 30s. And I was like, hmm, I started to get back pain and leg pain that I didn’t have before. And it does kind of build up over time and creep up on you. So I can understand when people want to have a more of a sit down job especially as we get older and I would say that there’s nothing wrong with that and you can do you know maybe 3 days in hospital, 2 days a week as a medical writer and sometimes you can just consult on things as well.
So as well as reviewing maybe you can proofread or you can accuracy check as well. So I’ve been doing some of that and I did that for the NHS.uk UK website recently and also for some agencies for some of their work for their educational materials for pharmacy teams and I would say that that’s also something worth looking at as well because some people are looking at AI taking over medical writing jobs but the problem with AI is that it’s not very trustworthy at the moment so accuracy checking and editing is kind of what what people are finding at the moment. And I would say there’s still room for writing because as I said, you’ve got that unique experience of everything that you’ve done in real life with real people and you can speak from that experience and then that is really valuable for you to write about and include in the medical writing information that you’re going to produce.
So I would say blog posts, social media posts, maybe accuracy checking or reviewing probably something that you want to look into. And also people might want to put your name on the document or piece of writing, especially if it’s going to be public information. And I would say you should consider charging extra for that because that increases the kind of authority of that piece because you are someone who’s gone through medical training. And so when you are reviewing something and it’s got your name on it, then that means you’re taking responsibility for what you’ve written. And I would say that is very very valuable to the company that is hiring you to write for them. So just consider offering that.
And also if you want to kind of take the next step with medical writing then I would say learn about search engine optimization which is SEO. And that is something that I teach also in a course which I will link to below this video. So, I hope you found this helpful and ultimately yes, you can be a medical writer if you are a UK medical doctor and I wish you the very best of luck and thank you so much for watching. Bye!