News roundup

Drug chiefs ponder how to improve industry's reputation

Canberra Bob Burton

Drug industry executives and advisers told a conference in Sydney last week that the poor public standing of the industry was hindering its ability to sell its products at higher prices to government agencies as well as its attempts to address public criticism.

Introducing a panel discussion on reputation management, Kristin Austin, director of the public relations company Ruder Finn, said that a review of coverage of the industry in the Sydney print media showed 30 positive stories in the preceding year but 40 critical stories.

"Each negative story requires six or seven positive stories to negate people’s misgivings," she told the third annual pharmaceutical marketing congress.

As an example of a "negative" media story she played a segment from a television current affairs programme on "disease mongering" that featured interviews with the freelance journalist Ray Moynihan and the health academic David Henry, a professor at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales.

Rod Unsworth, Schering-Plough’s group vice president of the Far East region, told the conference that "one industry that is ahead of us by a long way is the tobacco industry … Now that scares the hell out of me I have got to say … I am appalled by our reputation."

Bill Curtis, the founder of the Sydney based advertising and medical communications company Curtis Jones & Brown, said US market research showed that only about 25% of people agreed that the drug industry was doing a good job for the country, a similar percentage as for the tobacco industry. In Australia, he said, the industry is seen as "manipulative, dark, menacing."

Winning hearts and minds, he said, would increase the chances of being able to "support our pricing needs," and "it might enable the debate about prescription medicines to shift from price to value." There would be other benefits too: "It would allow us to marginalise the half dozen people broadly speaking who have strong negative, antagonistic points of view about our industry."

However, Alex Gosman, director of health care for GlaxoSmithKline, said that some of the industry’s problems were self inflicted.

"We don’t come to grips with what are some of the issues and why some people have some quite legitimate concerns about what the industry does," he said.

Michael Moore, senior manager of corporate affairs and external affairs for Bristol-Myers Squibb, agreed that the industry should continue to build "third party support" with health consumer groups, the medical profession, and political parties but challenged the suggestion that the industry needed to win broad support among the public.

"At the end of the day I don’t think that it matters so much, because we will still sell product whether or not mum and dad in the suburbs like pharmaceutical companies," he said.