Sales and marketing practice

As a global biopharmaceutical company, we market our medicines worldwide to doctors and other healthcare professionals, and to those who pay for healthcare.

We know that the marketing of pharmaceuticals sometimes raises some public concerns. In particular, our stakeholders and society in general want to be confident that pharmaceutical marketing practices do not compromise the ability of healthcare professionals to independently care for their patients.

Delivering consistently high standards of sales and marketing practice is one of our top priorities and sits at the core of our commitment to driving commercial success responsibly. Our activities centre on making sure that the appropriate information is provided to those who need it to support the safe and effective use of our medicines and enhance patient care.

A global approach

Our new Global Policy on External Interactions, launched in April 2011, further strengthens our commitment by providing a single common, principle-based approach to all our interactions with public officials, healthcare professionals and healthcare organisations, and community organisations worldwide. This means that everyone in AstraZeneca, wherever they are located, is required to work to our global standards of ethical sales and marketing practice. We believe this is especially important as we grow our business in emerging markets, such as China and Russia, alongside our continued efforts in established markets, including the US and Japan.

The diversity of business cultures around the world means that putting a global approach into practice at a local level is a challenge. Nevertheless, we are committed to making it work. We are providing extensive training and support for our people, and we are also talking to our customers and other stakeholders to explain the changes they are seeing to the way we are working with them. Read more.

Monitoring compliance

We have comprehensive processes in place to identify breaches of our Policy. We take all breaches very seriously and act to prevent them from happening again. This includes retraining or other corrective action, up to and including dismissal. Read more.

Our performance

In 2011, we identified a total of 17 confirmed breaches of external sales and marketing regulations or codes globally. Excluding these breaches, there were 1,275 instances of failure to comply with our Code of Conduct and global policies in our commercial organisation, including contract staff. In relation to all the breaches, we removed 214 people from their role, formally warned 570 people, and provided further guidance or coaching on our policies for 971 people. Read more about our performance against our key performance indicators.