Notable for its use of real document examples drawn from actual healthcare settings, in addition to its central section’s extended focus on narrative medicine and new media writing, Healthcare Writing: A Practical Guide to Professional Success provides a wide-ranging, much-needed contemporary perspective on the modes and contexts of writing most pertinent to today’s healthcare professionals. Aimed at students enrolled in university- or college-level healthcare programs, healthcare communication specialists, as well as at current clinical practitioners seeking a portable reference and guide, this book combines a detailed discussion of approaches to key healthcare document types—both professional and academic—with a thorough but accessible overview of essential points of grammar, punctuation, and style.

Bestselling author Michael Arntfield is a veteran police officer, professor, and television host. Known by his students as “Profficer,” an endearing blend of his academic and law enforcement professions, he teaches criminology at Western University and is a previous visiting Fulbright Chair at Vanderbilt University. With fifteen years of experience as a police officer, Arntfield offers a unique perspective into unsolved murder cases that combines suspenseful storytelling, academic knowledge, and investigative technology. He is the lead investigator on the true-crime series To Catch a Killer on the Oprah Winfrey Network in Canada and is the author of Murder City: The Untold Story of Canada’s Serial Killer Capital. He is also Director of the Murder Accountability Project in the United States and both the founder and Director of the Western University Cold Case Society in Canada.

When he isn’t teaching, investigating cold cases, or writing about them, he is researching long-term crime trends and developing new television projects. His latest research is on cyberbullying, social media, and psychopathy.

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“Written communication in all its forms is a vital component of clinical care, building professional relationships, and documenting learning. Unfortunately, most training programs offer no formal teaching or assessment of this complex skill. Healthcare Writing covers all the bases: chart notes, emails and letters, social media, reflective pieces, illness narratives, presentations, and research. Highly recommended for learners and educators from all healthcare disciplines.” —Allan Peterkin, MD, author of PORTFOLIO TO GO: 1000 Writing Prompts and Provocations for Clinical Learners

“Arntfield and Johnston’s text ushers this important field of professional communication into view for the purposes of teaching and learning. It skillfully synthesizes practical composition guidelines, writing studies theory, and everyday ‘institutional’ writing practices with more conceptual sections such as narrative medicine, pathography, scientific research, and reflective practice. The authors highlight the implications of digital technologies and situate healthcare writing within various medical and social contexts. This text is refreshingly non-proscriptive, and it can be easily adapted to existing pedagogy across healthcare programs while meeting the needs of novices and experts alike.” — Kathryn Alexander, Simon Fraser University

“This textbook is refreshingly non-prescriptive, and can easily be adapted to existing teaching across healthcare programs while meeting the needs of the novices and experts alike. Its objective is to teach students enrolled in university or college-level healthcare programs, healthcare communication specialists, as well as current clinical practitioners seeking a portable reference guide.” — The Lamp, NSW Nurses & Midwives’ Association