Our blog post last week ‘NHS White Paper: What the patient-centric approach means for healthcare communications’ ignited some debate on Twitter which we want to respond to. You can see the tweets people sent about the post on the page itself and our thoughts on these below.
Several of the tweets raised issue with the NHS White Paper itself. In our post, we were coming from a position of commenting on how the changes will impact on our profession, rather than a position of supporting new NHS policy itself (opinion is very much divided in our office!) However, other tweets questioned the role of the pharma industry in the provision of information to patients. This is a controversial issue, and as NHS patients ourselves, something we take seriously beyond being in the business of healthcare communications.
On a simple level, we believe that the pharma industry should be able to provide information to patients when appropriate. This is comparable to other industries. For example, when buying a car most people will initially develop a shortlist based on the brand’s advertising that most closely reflects their own values (such as safety, reliability or status). But because buying a car is a major investment it’s likely that the purchaser will also look to other sources for confirmation that the decision is the right one. When the claims the manufacturer makes are also backed up by Jeremy Clarkson and What Car? the brand and environmental messages are congruent and a purchase is more likely to occur.
While healthcare is very different, the principle is similar. In the same way that a car manufacturer knows more about their cars than anyone else, a pharma company knows more about its drugs than anyone else. Therefore, a pharma company should be able to share information about medicines with healthcare professionals and patient groups if appropriate of course always complying with regulatory obligations. We are not talking about direct to consumer advertising or direct communications with patients – this is something we’re more than happy we do not have in the UK. We are simply talking about the pharma industry providing balanced information in an appropriate manner to complement the information provided to patients by patient groups and healthcare professionals, such that patients are able to make well informed choices about their healthcare.
The point here is that the knowledge pharmaceutical companies have about their medicines should not be kept locked away, but communicated to healthcare professionals, and in some cases patients, in an appropriate and responsible way. If initiatives funded by a pharmaceutical company enable greater insights into the management of a condition, this can obviously benefit patients. In our opinion, it is not a question of whether pharma should be able to provide information to healthcare professionals and patients when appropriate, it is how they do it and what the information is.
Tags: healthcare communications, NHS, Virgo, Virgo HEALTH, Virgo HEALTH PR, White Paper
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TRIDUCIVE, Angie Wiles. Angie Wiles said: In defence of healthcare communications http://bit.ly/daVzJL #hcmktg [...]