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Corporate Responsibility Report 2008

Access to medicines

Access to healthcare is one of the world’s most pressing social challenges.

Every year millions of people in developing countries die from curable infectious diseases because they do not have access to basic healthcare services, including essential medicines. Millions more are unnecessarily exposed to the threat of ill health through inadequate or ineffective disease prevention strategies.

There are a number of complex factors that prevent access to medicines. There is often a limited prospect of a commercial return on R&D for neglected diseases; there is no unified registration system for medicines which makes the registration process costly, complex and time consuming; in many developing countries there is no distribution network for medicines and no healthcare infrastructure to treat patients and prescribe medicines. However, these problems must not be an excuse for inaction; rather they should indicate where action is most needed.

Over the last decade, the pharmaceutical industry has helped to address healthcare challenges in the developing world by researching new medicines and making them more available and affordable. Despite this progress, the scale of the healthcare crisis means that the industry must now take a more proactive approach. We have identified four key areas through which we will strengthen our approach:

1. Being more flexible on intellectual property

2. Being more flexible on pricing

3. Recognising that we achieve more in partnerships than we do alone

4. Looking at how we can move from being a supplier of medicines to being a partner in delivering solutions

Read more about our plans in these areas.

Abbas Hussain, President of Emerging Markets at GSK, leads our access efforts. These are also reviewed by the Corporate Executive Team, GSK’s most senior team, and by the Corporate Responsibility Committee of the Board.

Increasing access to medicines is important to our business for ethical, reputational and commercial reasons because:

• It is morally the right thing to do and is valued by our shareholders, employees and other stakeholders. It is aligned to our corporate mission and contributes to GSK’s reputation and ability to attract and retain talented employees
• Our business objective is to increase the proportion of the world’s population that has access to our medicines – currently around 20 per cent. The successful pharmaceutical companies of the future will serve a bigger proportion of the world’s population
• Our business relies on the intellectual property (IP) rights system which encourages medical innovation and progress. By taking measures to counter claims that IP is a major barrier to access, and by looking for ways to improve availability and affordability, we can help to increase access while maintaining support for intellectual property rights in our key business areas

The access problem is not confined to the developing world. For example, in the US many people suffer unnecessary ill health because they do not have healthcare insurance.

Our community investment programmes provide an additional resource for addressing healthcare challenges around the world. They support under-served communities through funding, education, practical support and donations.

We are always looking to refine and improve our contribution to improving access to medicines and in 2009 our CEO Andrew Witty announced a number of new approaches that we will be pursuing.

“I believe the pharmaceutical industry has a huge role to play. But we need to take much more of a leadership role. Historically we have always reacted to problems. In the future I want us to be proactive, genuinely finding new ways to increase research, increase access and eradicate disease.”

Andrew Witty, CEO (Speech at Carter Center, Atlanta, 4 December 2008)

Highlights