Our stakeholders encompass a wide sector of society; they include patients and their advocacy groups, community healthcare professionals, hospital healthcare professionals, pharmacists, health technology bodies, non-governmental organisations, think tanks and the government. In fact, we believe, to some extent, that the public as whole are also our stakeholders.
As part of Pfizer UK’s stakeholder engagement, we actively seek to listen and respond to the needs of these varying groups:
Patient Advocacy groups
Patient advocacy groups vary hugely in both their size and their mandate.
They vary hugely in both size and mandate but all often face budgetary challenges. This means they seek financial support from both the public and private sector, but this only forms one aspect of our relationship with them. Increasingly we are building relationships with patient groups who are increasingly interested in working collaboratively with us to find new solutions to old problems.
We also have a strong track record in disease awareness programmes, which we have delivered on our own and in partnership with patient organisations. Our disease awareness website www.pfizerlife.co.uk provides healthy living advice and disease awareness information across a range of conditions.
Health Technology Assessment Bodies
Health Technology Assessment Bodies (HTAs) review medical treatments on the basis of detailed clinical and economical evidence. There are three such bodies in the UK: the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) and the All-Wales Medicines Strategy Group (AWMSG). We have made a commitment to supply comprehensive information on our medicines to these bodies when we request them, and it is in our interests to do so – without a positive appraisal, the use of any new medicine in the UK is severely curtailed.
We have been criticised for being too agnostic in our dealings with HTAs and for being too quick to challenge their decisions. This is because we do not believe that the value of a medicine is always captured in the strict economic evaluation of its technical capabilities. We accept that there has been tension in our relationship with HTAs in the past and now are committed to working towards a more constructive relationship. We are keen to develop a closer working relationship with these bodies to help them shape assessment processes that will better allow valuable and innovative new medicines to be used appropriately.
We have set up a forum to stimulate discussion among a wide range of people with different areas of expertise and experience. This forum includes HTA representatives, policymakers, academics and representatives from patient organisations and the patients they represent. We hope this will lead to some interesting ideas about the future of HTAs.
Non-Governmental Organisations
There are a number of non-governmental organisations in the UK which are concerned about healthcare and related issues. We support some of these organisations through the Pfizer UK Foundation, which provides financial support to groups which work to minimise health inequalities. We have also worked closely with three organisations concerned with issues arising from our ageing population: Help the Aged, Age Concern and The Alliance for Health and the Future.
There are a number of UK NGOs who are based in the UK but have a global mandate, and are concerned with a range of issues which relate to developing countries. These issues are of great concern to us and our colleagues in New York who coordinate much of our activity in developing countries. From a global perspective, we believe we can best support the health of people in developing countries in three ways: By developing new medicines for diseases disproportionately affecting developing countries, by helping patients in developing countries by making our medicines affordable and by supporting developing countries directly by helping them develop effective healthcare system though capacity building programmes.
Community and Hospital Healthcare Professionals
We work closely with healthcare professionals to:
- ensure they have up-to-date information about our medicines,
- ensure they understand what our medicines cost and the financial implications for their budgets
- understand their aims and constraints properly so we can offer services that better meet the health challenges they face
- help them place our medicines correctly in a course of treatment
- improve our understanding of the impact hospital prescribing decisions have on Primary Care Trusts and healthcare in the community.
We have moved away from our outdated model of supporting our customers, to one in which we act as partners to identify solutions together and ensure transparency about investments, benefits and potential risks for all parties. We believe that this partnership approach is much more likely to result on ways of working that genuinely add value to our customers and help them meet the challenges they face in providing healthcare. Our goal is to enhance our role as a service provider to the NHS so we are not just a supplier.
Think Tanks
Pfizer has actively engaged with think tanks around the world for many years. In the UK we work with them to stimulate discussion and debate around healthcare provision in this country and to encourage new thinking to identify new solutions. Think tanks represent a range of different perspectives and are an important voice, but they need financial support. Pfizer provides this as we feel these organisations play a valuable role in stimulating debate about the future of public health services and other critical issues. We recognise that we must be open about why we are involved with these organisations and about what the mutual benefits are.
The Government
We talk to Government, politicians and civil servants about the way our medicines are priced, the impact of particular policies on patient safety and on the international competitiveness of our industry, the future of science and technology in the UK, medicines we have in development, the availability of medicines in the developing world, opportunities to develop new approaches to healthcare issues, the regulation of our industry and our compliance with the regulatory standards.
Healthcare is publicly funded in the UK and therefore the government is our main customer. We continue our dialogue with all those involved in the development and delivery of health, commercial and science policy in the UK. We never seek to exert undue influence at these meetings.
Pharmacists
The role of the pharmacist is changing. Some can now prescribe as well as dispense medicines and there is now more emphasis on patient consultation through Medicine Use Reviews in pharmacies. Pharmacists have told us that they are interested in hearing how we can play a more valuable role in our dealings with them. They are interested in hearing about the broader services we can offer them to support them in meeting the requirements of the new pharmacy contract. The new pharmacy contract represents a big change and we are keen to find ways to implement a range of tailored services. We will be listening to pharmacists about what they would find valuable and over time we will develop a range of service-based offerings for pharmacists based on their feedback and suggestions.
The Public
Every day 2.7 million people in the UK take a Pfizer medicine. We provide treatments for many common illnesses, like cardio-vascular disease, as well as for rarer conditions, such as certain cancers which only affect small numbers of people. We know that many people do not have high levels of trust in the pharmaceutical industry; some people think we charge too much for our medicines, some people believe passionately that animals should not be used in scientific research into the safety of new medicines and others feel that they cannot trust us to develop safe medicines. There is also the feeling among some people that we ‘invent’ illnesses so we can develop new blockbuster medicines, that our senior executives receive salaries that are too high and that we cover up clinical trial data when it doesn’t tell us what we want to hear. Some people simply don’t like the fact that we make a profit from people being ill.
These issues affect many of our colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry, but that does not mean that they are not our responsibility, in fact we care very much about these issues and have tried hard to address them. We have not been very good at communicating with people about these controversial issues or telling them what we are doing to address them. This is due to our extreme caution to adhere to the strict regulations which govern our industry. Our response has been characterised by extreme caution, like many other pharmaceutical company’s, but we recognise that we now need change this and become much better at engaging in honest discussions based on proper information and a shared understanding of different points of view.
Take a look at the In Healthcare section of this site to see how we work with the various stakeholders in the UK healthcare industry.