We believe that in order to make tomorrow’s world a healthier place for everyone, it is essential to help health professionals and patients make informed decisions about treatment paths. This support includes building health capacity as well as awareness. As a prerequisite, health systems need to be strong and benefit from solid collaborations to build resilience against crises and emergencies.
Our approach to building health capacity and awareness
Capacity-building and awareness-building play key roles in our approach to improving access to health. We empower patients, communities, scientists, and healthcare professionals by providing appropriate tools, skills and information so that they can make informed decisions about prevention, diagnosis, treatment, care, and disease management.
The private sector is a crucial partner in responding to global health threats. Beyond developing innovative health solutions and applying adapted mechanisms for access to medicines, we support countries in building up infrastructure and expertise for preparedness of local health systems to deliver care to all patients in need and address emergencies effectively. That is why we invest to strengthen the prevention, preparedness and resilience capabilities of health systems in low- and middle-income countries. Our efforts include the following aspects:
- Increasing country preparedness by enhancing scientific and healthcare workforce competencies and capacities through a network of experts.
- Forming partnerships to extend disease awareness and address the challenge of enabling consistent access to medicines for all patients in need.
- Optimizing the monitoring and evaluation of health initiatives at country level through data processing and digitalization.
We operationalize these elements along the entire value chain in our collaborative programs and through our health education initiatives with our local partners.
We also collaborate with committed global partners to conduct educational campaigns for prevention, early diagnosis and awareness. We focus primarily on the diseases for which we have the greatest expertise. Our activities include specific initiatives that promote awareness for carers as well as women’s health and economic empowerment to expand their access to health.
Roles and responsibilities
Our Global Health organization leads collaborative capacity strengthening and awareness initiatives in low- and middle-income countries to support our mission of improving the health of the most vulnerable populations.
Beyond this, our awareness initiatives are individually planned by our various businesses and aligned with the global strategic direction of the Group. They are implemented on global and/or local levels and organized according to the specific needs of the relevant community. Our subsidiaries are also responsible for locally mobilizing our global campaigns.
Our commitment: access to health through awareness and education
Our strategy for addressing access to health incorporates the topic of awareness and education as detailed in our Charter on Access to Health in Developing Countries. Our campaigns and initiatives are also subject to the respective marketing principles set out in guidelines such as our Pharma Code for Conducting Pharmaceutical Business and Pharmaceutical Operations. In addition, our campaigns are governed by internal policies that guide our interactions with health systems and by communication material review processes that ensure we comply with global, regional and national rules and regulations.
Working with partners to achieve more
Our Global Health portfolio consists of collaborative initiatives that aim to strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of health systems in low- and middle-income countries. We support work in these four key areas:
Local research and development
We build scientific capacity through our R&D programs and focus primarily on schistosomiasis and also include malaria. Some examples include:
- Clinical trials in African health centers to investigate arpraziquantel as a potential new treatment option for pre-school children infected with schistosomiasis. These trials have enabled local healthcare professionals to acquire valuable experience in Good Clinical Practice, which they can apply in other studies.
- Our partnership with the University of Cape Town for malaria drug discovery activities that transfer scientific expertise and support the employment and training of talented local young scientists.
- PAVON (Pan-African Vivax and Ovale Network), a network of centers for excellence in over ten African countries. It offers training to African scientists in a collective effort to build capacity and expertise to treat all forms of malaria.
Manufacturing and supply chains
We manufacture some of our products directly in the regions where they are needed. We also strengthen local manufacturing and supply chain capacities through technology and best practice transfers. Our aim is to increase service quality while ensuring safe, effective and reliable access to quality medicines where they are needed most.
- We produce praziquantel, the standard-of-care treatment for schistosomiasis, in our production facility in Mexico. This enables the provision of up to 250 million tablets per year to treat the disease, mainly in school-age children.
- We apply a local production approach in our work with the Pediatric Praziquantel Consortium to help countries become self-sufficient and serve local populations in need. We are partnering with Universal, a contract manufacturer in Kenya, to prepare for the large-scale production of arpraziquantel upon its approval, in addition to the production by Farmaguinhos in Brazil.
- We partner with Business for Health Solutions (BHS) to build sustainable supply chains of local distributors in Africa through our Access Delivery Mentorship program. Since the start of the collaboration in 2019, we have supported a total of seven distributors in five countries.
Education and awareness raising
We invest in education and behavioral change initiatives that raise disease awareness. Examples of those initiatives include:
- In Ethiopia, we operate a joint health education and WASH project in partnership with the NALA Foundation and the Ethiopian Ministry of Health. We reached around 230,000 community members and more than 370,000 school-age children in districts with the highest prevalence of schistosomiasis. More information about the project can be found under Global Health.
- To support behavioral change for schistosomiasis elimination, we introduced the Bilharzia Storytelling Lab in 2022. The lab brings together storytellers, health experts and community leaders from one country to develop creative communication products that provide accessible and tailored disease information to risk groups. We award the most promising solution with a € 10,000 prize. We intend to apply the concept in several endemic countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2023, the winning team from Rwanda successfully piloted its solution in three schools. We are preparing a third lab for 2024.
Health infrastructure and training
We are building infrastructure, strengthening health systems and supporting training in low- and middle-income countries.
In 2023, our achievements included:
- Continuing our support for the availability of microscopes and training sessions in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Botswana to improve local health workers’ ability to detect malaria and other diseases that can be diagnosed via blood samples. In 2023, we also prepared to extend this initiative in Nigeria and Kenya.
- Completing our collaborative access to water program in Ghana. It improves healthcare infrastructure through safe water services in health centers and provides training to health workers on schistosomiasis case management.
- Partnering with the H3D Foundation at the University of Cape Town and launching a virtual, free-of-charge drug discovery and development course. It primarily targets students and scientists in low- and middle-income countries.
- Integrating the Thyromobile project in the Philippines as part of our access initiatives to strengthen health systems in low- and middle-income countries. The mobile unit brings essential equipment and personnel to specific communities to provide public information and healthcare services to patients with thyroid disorders. Since its launch in May 2023, the Thyromobile has covered 15 provinces in the Philippines with high incidence rates of thyroid disorders.
More information can be found under Global Health.
Global awareness campaigns
We regularly conduct campaigns to raise awareness of various diseases across the globe, often in collaboration with patient advocacy and carer groups. We focus on diseases that are aligned with our core competencies, expertise and experience along the health value chain. These diseases include cancer (specifically colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer and bladder cancer), thyroid disorders, diabetes, infertility, and multiple sclerosis. Throughout the year, we also conduct awareness campaigns that focus on tropical diseases, such as schistosomiasis and malaria.
We actively participated in several awareness days:
January 30: World NTD Day
World NTD Day brings together civil society advocates, community leaders, global health experts, and policymakers who collaborate across disciplines to control and eliminate neglected tropical diseases.
February 4: World Cancer Day
February 4 marks World Cancer Day, an annual initiative led by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC). It aims to raise cancer awareness and improve its prevention, detection and treatment. In 2023, the theme was again “Close the care gap”.
April 7: World Health Day
World Health Day raises awareness about a specific health theme each year to highlight a priority area of concern for the World Health Organization. In 2023, the theme was “Health for all”.
April 25: World Malaria Day
World Malaria Day highlights the need for continued investment in and sustained political commitment to malaria prevention and control.
May 25-31: Thyroid Awareness Week
In collaboration with the Thyroid Federation International (TFI), the annual awareness campaign, which used the slogan “Know Your Past and Understand Your Future” in 2023, to inform that genetics may strongly influence the risk of developing thyroid disorders.
May 30: World Multiple Sclerosis Day
World Multiple Sclerosis Day is an annual awareness day by the MS International Federation (MSIF). It brings the global MS community together to share stories, raise awareness and campaign with everyone affected by multiple sclerosis. In 2023, it focused on again on ”connections”.
July 27: World Head And Neck Cancer Day
World Head and Neck Cancer Day is an opportunity to inform the general public about head and neck cancer and recognize the impact it has on those affected in the community.
August 1: World Lung Cancer Day
The Forum of International Respiratory Societies has observed World Lung Cancer Day every year since 2012 to raise awareness about the risk factors of the disease.
September 17: Patient Safety Day
We celebrate Patient Safety Day via our affiliates worldwide to raise awareness about this vital topic. In 2023, we organized various online and on-site events with affiliates in all continents and jointly celebrated Patient Safety Day with other companies in India and Kenya.
September 29: World Heart Day
World Heart Day was established by the World Heart Federation and increases awareness about cardiovascular diseases and how to control them to negate their global impact.
November 1-7: European Fertility Week
European Fertility Week raises awareness about infertility and conveys the issues faced by people with infertility. It also aims to remove the stigma around infertility and highlight the issue of unequal access to treatment in Europe.
November 14: World Diabetes Day
World Diabetes Day was created in response to growing concerns about the escalating health threat posed by diabetes. The aim of the 2023 campaign, the theme of which was “Show Type 2 Diabetes the Red Card”, was to keep diabetes in both the public and political spotlight.
Purpose-driven initiatives
Healthy Women, Healthy Economies and Embracing Carers® are two initiatives we are using to promote awareness of public health issues extending beyond patients. The interconnectedness of both initiatives is rooted in shared themes and goals. The majority of unpaid and underpaid caregiving hours globally are provided by women and girls. Through these initiatives, we aim to both promote and support women’s health and economic empowerment and expand access to health.
Healthy Women, Healthy Economies
To empower women to overcome the challenges of communicable and non-communicable diseases and reach their economic potential, we are committed to the Healthy Women, Healthy Economies initiative – a public-private partnership founded within the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).
The APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize, which we support, has highlighted sex-disaggregated research that enables policymakers, business leaders and other stakeholders to identify and implement measures that improve women’s health in APEC economies. In 2023, the US$ 20,000 prize was awarded to Dr. Jason Junjie Huang, the Deputy Director and Research Assistant Professor at the Centre for Health Education and Health Promotion at the Chinese University of Hong Kong). His study investigated the global burden of endometrial cancer and its risk factors, primarily lifestyle choices such as smoking and alcohol consumption.
Embracing Carers
Embracing Carers® is our global initiative led in collaboration with prominent caregiving organizations from around the world. Embracing Carers is designed to increase awareness, action and discussion around the frequently overlooked needs of unpaid caregivers.
In 2023, Embracing Carers collaborated with the United Nations-Guided Global Initiative on Ageing (GIA) to provide a training course on critical skills for family caregivers. The five-module course offers professional instruction and guidance on vital caregiving topics such as using medical equipment, creating safe environments and overcoming communication barriers.