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Corporate Responsibility Report 2008

Patient advocacy

Patient groups are non-profit organisations founded by patients, care-givers, family members and health professionals.

They provide their members with information about their condition and guidance on how to live with their disease. They engage with healthcare providers, governments and the media to promote improved treatment and services for patients and campaign for change on issues that affect patients’ and carers’ lives. Some carry out vital research into the causes and potential treatments for specific conditions.

GSK works with a wide range of patient groups in disease areas such as cancer, asthma, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and HIV/AIDS. GSK and patient groups share a common concern that healthcare systems should focus on preventing, treating and managing disease. Both parties believe that patients should have access to quality medicines, services and information on disease.

Patient groups are important stakeholders for GSK and we engage with them as part of our commitment to be a patient focused company. Our relationships with patient groups are mutually beneficial. They help us to better understand patient needs and their illnesses. We work with patient groups to strengthen their support for patients throughout their illness, from diagnosis to chronic treatment and end-of-life care. We also help these groups give patients the ability to have their voice heard in the healthcare debate, alongside other stakeholders.

Our approach

We support patient groups across the world in a number of different ways. These include:

• Providing core funding to support the day-to-day running of the group
• One-off donations to help patient groups conduct a specific event or activity, for example a breast cancer awareness day
• Educational support
• Training staff in management skills and disease education
• Working together on disease awareness/prevention projects

Our relationship with each patient group is defined by a written agreement specifying how the group will use our funding to benefit its members.

Some stakeholders are concerned that pharmaceutical companies use patient groups as a way of marketing their products. Our support for patient groups is about the bigger agendas that dictate whether or not new medicines are made available to patients, and whether patients have access to the kind of treatments that they need. We are committed to maintaining the highest ethical standards and transparency in this area.

We have developed detailed guidance and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for employees in each of our major regions. These policies, used in conjunction with GSK’s patient advocacy manual, ensure that GSK employees who work with patient groups comply with applicable laws and regulations and our standards. Read a summary of our SOP.

All employees, and outside agencies working for GSK that are likely to interact with patient groups, must abide by our guidelines and SOPs. We provide training so that our employees understand our requirements. For example in 2008, around 70 marketing employees in the US attended a webinar on our guidelines and SOPs.

Our patient advocacy teams in Europe and our Asia Pacific, Japan and Emerging Market region coordinate interaction with patient groups and adherence with our policies and global principles. In the US, patient advocacy is decentralised across a number of functions including state government affairs, R&D, communications and marketing, but is coordinated by the state government affairs group.

Employees in all regions can access our patient advocacy resource intranet site. In Europe, we also publish a newsletter to raise employee awareness about internal and external developments relating to patient groups.

In 2007, we conducted a review of departments that have relationships with patient groups in the US. This led to the development of an interactive patient group database that tracks our relationships with patient advocacy groups and the projects we support. This will enable employees to learn about past interactions with patient groups and the type of projects supported. It will help us to allocate resources to patient groups more efficiently. The database will be launched in 2009.

Encouraging independence

We believe that patient groups should be independent and we encourage them to seek financial support from as wide a range of organisations as possible. We ensure that the funding we give to patient groups is appropriate to their size.

Our guidelines state that GSK funding should make up no more than 25 per cent of a group’s overall income. In the vast majority of instances the actual percentage is much lower. We allow some exemptions to the 25 per cent cap as some of the groups supported have limited incomes, so a small donation (for example £1,000) would exceed the limit, and because some groups have difficulty attracting funding because of the nature of their activity (for example, providing needle exchange for drug users). These cases must be approved by the general manager of each local operating company. We also encourage patient groups to seek funding from multiple sources and we hold workshops on how to make funding applications.