Using Your Outstanding Healthcare Experience For Freelance Writing

Using Your Healthcare Experience For Freelance Writing

A Guest Post from Wendy

Maximizing Skill Sets

You don’t know where you’re going to be in one year, much less ten. You also don’t know the full extent of your skillset if you maintain a “monochrome” existence operationally. For example: if you spend your life as a musician, you could be in the back corner of a dingy bar for thirty years, or if you exploit contacts you make along the way, you may be able to work as a music professor at a community college or something of the kind. Certainly, such a position would require a level of personal responsibility, and the ability to communicate skills. But though you haven’t officially studied to teach, your world experience could very well land you the position. It’s not always about your pedigree—have you ever heard the saying: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? This reality holds true for practically all professions—especially healthcare. Healthcare experience gives you a variety of knowledge and skillsets that can be put to use all over the market. You could work as a school nurse with some RN knowledge from a clinic, you could work as an advisor at a legal firm in terms of client damages, you could work as an advisor for media agencies needing similar assistance—and you could write. Of these options, writing can be one of the most effective, and one of the most convenient. When it comes to writing, you’ve got authority and client choice. As a previous healthcare practitioner, you understand intimately the needs of modern health. As an independent contractor, you can use your healthcare experience and choose with whom you work, and keep out the “riff-raff”.

Learning How To Write

If you’re wondering how to use your healthcare experience knowledge as a freelance writer,  you can take the Free Online Health Writer Course. Something else you can do is explore the existing literature. You may be surprised to find what constitutes healthcare writing today. Sometimes it’s less “in-depth” than you might expect. There are plenty of resources available like Healthcare.com which can help you hone your writing and verify facts. Try those pertaining to your personal healthcare experience and responsibility: “When you’re turning 26, health insurance immediately becomes more of a concern. The transition from being covered under a parent’s plan to finding coverage on your own can be quite daunting.” Using your healthcare experience as a nurse, you can help ease that transition. Certainly, there are technical papers written by practitioners for an audience of professionals. But there are also blogs, health tips, insider knowledge, and other areas of writing facilitated via the internet which don’t require some in-depth examination of advanced medical concepts requiring near a decade of higher education to parse through. You may be surprised at how informal much health writing actually is. The reason pertains to readers. Those who are looking up most of the available health writing materials online aren’t practitioners for the most part. Generally, they’re just regular individuals looking to understand their own health. You may find that demand for that which you write increases based on how easy it is to read. Especially with blogs, those hosting aren’t usually looking for in-depth data. They’re not looking for the etymology and virology of streptococcus. They’re just looking for what kind of fruit juice to drink, whether to take antibiotics, and best practices to overcome the cold.

Multiple Avenues Of Approach

There are a number of different ways to start health-writing. You can go online and look for jobs, you can start your own blog branching off from basic healthy practices like diet and exercise, or you can work with content writing agencies who specialize in healthcare. It’s all going to depend on your needs, your availability, and your drive. That said, from all work comes profit—it may just be of a collateral kind; like writing discipline. Ideally, you should be able to write features on your terms and submit them to periodicals who pay well. But to do that, you’ll need to establish your authority as a writer. Content writers are in high demand, but often go un-named—so you need to find a way to get yourself out there. That said, once you find your “legs”, as it were, you may find that you make more money working less time as a writer

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