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Ethical conduct

GSK is fully committed to ensuring that our business practices meet high standards of ethics and legal compliance and that our employees behave with honesty and integrity.

It is important that we get this right. The way we conduct our business affects the patients and consumers who use our products, the doctors who prescribe our medicines, the governments that regulate our industry, and our reputation. Our reputation with these stakeholders is critical to our business. Our reputation also affects our ability to attract, retain and motivate the best people. Meeting high ethical standards enables us to maintain the support of these stakeholders and retain our ‘licence to operate’.

This section explains our approach to business and marketing ethics and our performance in 2005. It covers:

• GSK’s Code of conduct and management certification on business ethics.
• Our approach to marketing ethics, including our marketing codes of practice and updated policy on direct-to-consumer advertising.
• Training and awareness programmes to reinforce the importance of ethical conduct and to ensure that employees understand what standards of behaviour are required.
• Monitoring and compliance systems, including the role of our Corporate Ethics and Compliance department, channels for receiving reports of alleged cases of misconduct and data on the number of employees dismissed or disciplined for violating company policies including our Code of Conduct.

Information on ethical issues in R&D is available in the research section of this report. This includes our policies governing our relationship with doctors involved in clinical trials (see Conduct of clinical trials) and our policy on disclosure of clinical trial results and writing of articles for medical journals (see Public disclosure of trial results).

Information on our relationships with governments is available in the section on Government and external affairs. For our policies on making our products more widely available, see Access to medicines.

More background information on our ethics policies is available in Business ethics.

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