Help CCGs help you, pharma told
pharmafile | November 30, 2012 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | CCGs, JSNA, NHS, pharma
Pharma companies have a big opportunity to take advantage of the changes in the structure of the NHS, according to the leader of one clinical commissioning group (CCG).
David Thorne, chief executive of Newcastle West CCG, was speaking to an audience of pharma company executives at the PM Society/Wellards forum on market access at the King’s Fund.
Local authorities’ Joint Strategic Needs Assessments (JSNA), outlining the needs of their communities, represent a treasure trove for pharma firms, Thorne said.
“Health and Wellbeing Boards are an extremely productive avenue for you,” he explained. “The JSNA is an absolute goldmine in terms of market information for you.”
With an average cut of 28% in grants from central government to local authorities, they would be looking for anything which could help them do their job more effectively and cheaply.
Therefore designing care pathways and providing training are obvious routes into CCGs. “Pharma is much better than the NHS at training,” Thorne said. But with patients suffering early in their lives from chronic conditions such as heart disease, A&E is ‘the battleground’.
Thorne explained that measures helping CCGs to reduce non-elective admissions – and, crucially, to stay within budget – will be welcomed since the avoidable cost of admitting someone to hospital means that money is sucked out of CCG coffers for other treatments.
“Every half hour we have an emergency admission, which is a system failure,” he explained. “That uses up someone else’s budget for the rest of the year. The dependency on secondary care has to change. The system is broken.”
Pharma companies can also give practical help to CCGs in areas such as business intelligence, management support and systems, project management, organisational development and networking, Thorne believes.
“Show me something [I haven’t spotted] and help me sort it out and I’m interested,” he said. “We’ll bite your arm off.”
But although pharma companies have a key role to play with CCGs, they also have to be more aware of how GPs – particularly in inner-cities – and their patients will perceive reps.
“The cars they have, the clothes they wear – that really is a cultural mismatch,” Thorne said. “See the person and you’ve seen the company. You have to bear that in mind.”
In an area like Newcastle, where the average male life expectancy is 63.9 – “similar to Guatemala” – and a third of women giving birth have smoked that day, pharma needs to be alive to local needs.
Promotional tools ‘like your little A5 leaflets’ must be tailored to the community in which treatments are being used, he said.
“So when someone comes to me with a sales aid or a laptop tool, is that based in reality? Probably not,” he added.
And in a final stark illustration of what he was talking about, Thorne said patient literature now in his CCG is being written in language suitable for a nine-year-old to understand, and they would like to use cartoons rather than words in future to get their message across.
For details on attending Pharmafile’s conference ‘CCGs, the new NHS and Pharma’ on 5 December in London, click here.
Adam Hill
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