PharmaDispatch is launching video functionality from today headlined by an interview with Christian Sellars, Director Market Access, Public Affairs and Customer Centricity at MSD.
The new functionality will be implemented over the next few months with the goal of creating a platform for the discussion of issues impacting the pharmaceutical sector.
In addition to his current senior role at MSD, Mr Sellars has served the company in external affairs and commercial roles, including overseas, and is a current member of the Medicines Australia Strategic Committee.
In the interview, Mr Sellars discusses the challenges facing government, the opportunities for industry, how it needs to be clearer in its advocacy and why he works in the pharmaceutical industry.
Below is an edited transcript of the interview with Christian Sellars
Question: What are your thoughts on the challenges the government will face over the next three years, particularly in health?
I think the way in which that conversation was run for the last few years, I think as we have seen from the outcome, the fact that Medicare was such a prominent part of the election, I don't think it has been done particularly well.
I think there is a great deal of reform that has to happen but I think a very good outcome will come of that. There has to be a positive, engaged conversation.
I also think government has actually achieved some amazing things and our industry has developed a big chunk of that. I don't think we've spoken about it enough. I don't think government has spoken about it enough. I really think that health can be a positive, good story. It can be a real political asset.
Question: What could industry have done differently in the past three years?
We haven't spoken to a broader audience. I think we've been very, very focussed on a fairly narrow group of customers within government and I don't think we've made an effort to articulate a story that's resonated, even internally.
We often talk to technical matters, we talk to policy detail, we don't articulate why we're meaningful or the contribution we make.
The kind of transformative changes the industry will help bring about are going to be amazing. We have to talk about those and we have to claim them because frankly they wouldn't happen with out us. We have to become more confident.
Question: Do you need to get the conversation beyond product? How does industry do that?
It’s a very interesting issue and I think it’s a challenge because to some extent it’s a bit of a collective problem. In some ways all of us would benefit from having a more positive conversation but no one company can leverage or take the benefit from that.
We all have to contribute and I think there really has to be a concerted and co-ordinated effort led by Medicines Australia with individual groups of companies.
I think we're very, very quick to turn on a sales team and spend tens of millions of dollars when we have a product but the kind of resourcing we see in public affairs hasn't changed a great deal in the last few years. My sense is it really is an area where we have to begin to contribute. When we do that we can't simply focus on internal matters. We can't simply focus on short-term commercial matters either. We have to tell the stories of the industry more broadly and we all get to benefit from that. My hope is that as those stories become more prominent it will encourage more to do it.
Question: Is the industry good at listening? Does it need to invest more in understanding the environment before engaging with it?
I think there has to be a lot more consideration of all the different actors who participate in health and how different messages will resonate with different stakeholders. I think that requires a great deal of listening.
I think we also need to recognise that a lot of the value we bring is totally apparent to patients and totally apparent to clinicians and these are the groups who are the ones who have to articulate what we do and have to articulate not product names, not particular indications or launch dates, these groups have to say this is what access to medicine means to me. This is how it’s transformative for me. This is what it means in terms of my relationship with my disease. This is what it means in terms of my relationship with my family. Those are the stories that we have to begin to tell and I have to say that we have made a lot of progress. The ‘room with the patient view’ forum was fantastic. Those conversations are very, very promising and those are the conversations I think we have to encourage.
Question: How do you get the public affairs conversation out of pricing and economics?
You start talking at a public health level about consequences, about how transformative changes might be. What does that mean in terms of disease burden? What does that mean in terms of the huge, hundreds of thousands of patients potentially that will benefit from that? I also think we need to spend a lot more time celebrating what we've achieved. This is what was quite remarkable about Frank Lichtenberg’s research Medicines Australia showcased late last year, where we said look in the last couple of decades - we have reduced the amount of avoidable death by twenty-five per cent. That is phenomenal.
So I think we have to tell these stories, we have to become much better as you say coming away from the product, coming away from the individual economics and think about the consequence. Because if you don't talk about benefits, you don't think about consequences, it's just money, and money can slosh from one account to another account and it doesn’t actually mean anything. How do you make a case to the Australian electorate or the Australian public that medicines is a place where you should see growth, where there should be further investment, where we should have early access to promising therapy.
Question: What do you see as the goals for industry? And what do you expect the conversation to be in three years time?
I think the goal for industry in the next three years is to begin to build the relationships and to begin to build the connections that will make a balanced conversation about health possible. I also think there are some very, very hard calls the government is going to have to make in the next three years. The whole Medicare discussion we've had over the last couple of months has been very difficult, but the fact of the matter is the MBS desperately needs reform.
Our industry, our individual companies and our industry representatives, need to have the confidence to engage in these discussions and can't simply focus only on the very narrow policies that affect medicines. We often diminish ourselves by only speaking about those policies that have a narrow commercial impact on our products. We have to be more courageous. We will make lots of mistakes in the process and that's entirely fine. But if we don't find our voice and we don't have the confidence to articulate the story about our industry there is no doubt that we will go the route of New Zealand.
Question: What does industry need to do to make this happen?
What MSD, other companies, Medicines Australia have to do to make a more constructive conversation about medicines happen is they have to start talking. They have go get out there. They have to speak to the media. They have to put their stories across. And initially it’s going to be pretty ugly. Chances are the stories won’t land well, the messages won’t land well but a lot of this is simply a noise game.
The challenge I have is the people that make the most noise about our industry are people who are fundamentally antagonistic towards us, have no understanding of the contribution we make, no understanding of the absolute basics of how the business works, but command huge air time, huge presence and fundamentally shape the way Australians think about the sector.
Question: Why do you work in industry?
Because I believe in what we do, fundamentally. My own organisation, MSD, has an incredibly rich heritage going back to the production of penicillin. Many of the great breakthroughs in anti-infectives, in HIV, in oncology, in cardiovascular disease, have been pioneered in my organisation. Colleagues in other companies can talk to their own heritages, which are as rich and as powerful. The world needs companies like ours. The idea that somehow we're simply organisations that pull research out of universities and then deliver huge profits and that’s all we do is complete nonsense. We know that, without our organisations, many of the advances we have seen simply would not be there. You and I would be looking at life expectancy still at sixty-five.
You know what is it that has contributed to the incredible longevity gains we have made in the last decades? It's our companies.
No one else is doing this work. The Department of Health is not investing the billions of dollars that make this possible. Universities are not investing the billions of dollars that make this possible. No one else is taking the risks that make it possible. Government isn't doing it. We're doing it and when we get it wrong we pay the consequence. It can be horrific and many of our companies have been through near death experiences. We take those risks and we continue to be courageous because we believe in what we do and because the outcomes for patients in our community are profound.
So, why do I do the job I do? Because I think it's hugely meaningful and I can see the impact it has on individuals, on families and on the community - that is why I work for MSD.
