Ensuring that our medicines benefit the widest possible number of patients is at the heart of our mission to enable people to do more, feel better and live longer. In 2001, one of GSK’s General Pharma sales and marketing units in the US made it a key business objective to improve access to GSK medicines to patients from ethnic minority communities.

The unit operates in a part of southern California with a particularly high population of Vietnamese, Koreans, Armenians, Central Americans and Mexicans.

The sales teams had specific training on cultural awareness to improve their understanding of their customers and their particular needs. As a result, doctors are better able to use GSK products, with benefits for individual patients and for these communities.

Building on this success, cultural awareness training was extended to all sales groups across the US during 2002. This approach is also being used in GSK’s US Pharma marketing departments to increase multicultural awareness and understanding relating to each of our brands.

In addition, through our multi-language patient education programme, we are supporting US healthcare professionals in raising awareness of diseases and disease management among groups with limited command of English. Disease education materials on asthma, migraine, rhinitis and depression are being provided by GSK sales representatives in a number of languages including Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Russian.