Access to healthcare

Providing sustainable access to healthcare for all those who need it is a significant global challenge. The complexities surrounding the issue mean that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Factors affecting access range from the affordability of medicines to the availability of healthcare systems and the resources to make them effective. We believe it will take a combined global effort involving all related stakeholders to drive sustainable progress in increasing access to healthcare worldwide – and we know that, as a global biopharmaceutical company, we can make a meaningful contribution to that effort.

Our strategy takes account of the different barriers to healthcare in different parts of the world and, because access to healthcare can also vary within a country, our approach is tailored locally to meet the needs of different patient populations. We are pursuing a range of different initiatives across these populations to understand what works best and in what context. Best practice will be shared and replicated.

We believe that we will be able to make the greatest contribution to increasing access to healthcare when our approach is commercially sustainable – because this underpins our continued business success which in turn generates the revenue we need to reward shareholders, invest in continued innovation and, importantly, continue to explore and adopt ways of broadening the affordability of our medicines to reach more patients. It’s about shared value – for patients, for stakeholders, for our business and for society.

We are in the process of developing non-financial performance indicators for monitoring our performance across all our access to healthcare initiatives. These are most likely to centre on the number of patients reached and the associated health outcomes, but we are also looking at other ways in which we can monitor and measure the impact of our strategies.