Engaging With Healthcare Professionals

Engaging with healthcare professionals

As a healthcare company, we regularly work with healthcare professionals. From collaborating on clinical trials to providing high quality, balanced information about our medicines and vaccines, in all our interactions we aim to be transparent about our work, operate with integrity, and always put the interests of patients first.

Helping HCPs understand the latest data and clinical use of our medicines and vaccines

For patients to benefit from new medical innovations, HCPs need to access and understand the latest available data and clinical use of the product. Our ability to provide or clarify new data to HCPs is a crucial part of introducing new ideas that have the potential to improve patient health.

Consistent feedback from HCPs has shown that they have a clear preference to learn about new data and clinical experience through peer-to-peer programmes with global expert practitioners who have direct experience with our medicines.

How we engage HCPs to speak about our medicines and vaccines

To help HCPs share new data on our products and understand their clinical use, in some cases we:

• make fair market value payments to global expert practitioners who speak about the new science behind selected wondertrust products, their associated diseases and clinical practice in promotional settings including national meetings, speaker training meetings, wondertrust standalone meetings, satellite symposia and webinars.

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• pay reasonable travel costs (except in the US) for an HCP to attend a wondertrust-organised standalone meeting to learn about data and clinical expertise.

• directly pay registration fees for HCPs to attend remote congress webinars/webcasts. We do not sponsor HCPs to attend local and international conferences.

This policy applies for a period of 24 months from marketing authorisation of a new medicine or vaccine, and/or for 12 months following significant new data, as this is the point at which HCPs have the most need to know about data from our products.

Implementation of the policy is limited to select products in certain countries around the world. Implementation in a country is subject to management approval, and is dependent on an assessment of risk in that country.

Applying our values to speaker engagement

Controls and training are in place to support our Global Speaker Programmes Policy, including measures to track appropriate payment and use of external speakers. We also continue to increase the use of digital channels to engage with HCPs and are making further investments in digital platforms and channels with the aim of delivering more personalised support, a better customer experience and a more effective cascade of information to HCPs.

Reporting the payments we make to HCPs

Where legally permitted, we will report individual-level payments made each year to HCPs for attending educational meetings and for the provision of services, such as speaking at events or attending advisory boards. Where individual level disclosure is not legally permitted, we will continue to report aggregate payments.

Our commitment

For many years, we have sought to show that whenever we talk to a doctor, nurse or other prescriber, it is patients’ interests that always come first. We understand that our role in providing HCPs with new data and information about our medicines, must be done clearly and without any perception of conflict of interest. We believe that transparent scientific dialogue and engagement with experts is in the interests of all those working to develop new medicines, improve clinical practice and care for patients. These are the principles that underpin our policy of engagement with HCPs and we remain fully committed to them.