PROGRESS is being made in the pharmacy sector as it seeks to address issues around Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), says a study report commissioned by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) along with consultancy firm, Accenture.
The new Accenture commissioned report concluded that Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are, in the main part, embryonic, and most teams lack focused resources, and data collection remained patchy and inadequate though accepted more time might be necessary.
The report was published mainly to establish just how far EDI has come among the Association’s member companies.
Pinder Sahota, president of the ABPI, wrote in a foreword to the report: “The report was part of the association’s EDI Strategy, which was launched in April 2021 in the wake of the Marmot Ten Years on Health Equity Review*, the disproportionate impact COVID-19 had on ethnic minority groups, the Black Lives Matter movement and the Cumberlege Report**.
“Equality, diversity, and inclusion are about ensuring the workforce is representative of the communities that we live in and the communities that we serve,” stated the Accenture report.
“It is about ensuring that everybody has equal opportunity access and has a sense of belonging within the organisations they work in. This starts with creating a culture that allows employees to bring their true authentic selves to work each day,” the report further cited.
The Accenture report was published in April 2022 and is based on the survey responses of 29 ABPI member companies, individual interviews with 18 general managers and human resource directors and focus groups with 12 employee resource groups and EDI network leads.
The study carried out in September and October 2021 have also found that strategies have often extended beyond the workforce. Twenty-eight per cent of survey respondents said they were also focusing their efforts on suppliers, 24 per cent on their customers, and more than a third on the external community, with a focus on healthcare inequalities in wider society.
According to the report, the conclusion is EDI planning is “starting to take shape”, with 83 per cent of companies having a defined strategy for the organisation and 59 per cent having a UK-specific strategy.
*Led by Professor Sir Michael Marmot, the review explores changes since 2010 in five policy objectives: giving every child the best start in life; enabling all people to maximise their capabilities and have control over their lives; ensuring a healthy standard of living for all; creating fair employment and good work for all; creating and developing healthy and sustainable places and communities.
**On 8 July 2020, the Conservative peer Baroness Julia Cumberlege published the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, looking into the response of England’s healthcare system to patients’ reports of harm from drugs and medical devices.
Commissioned in 2018, the review was conducted through the lens of three medical treatments: Hormone pregnancy tests (mainly the drug Primodos), Anti-epileptic sodium valproate, and the Pelvic mesh, a surgical material (technically a medical device).
The Cumberlege review was inspired by longstanding patient campaigns alleging harm from these three interventions, and the panel’s explicitly declared approach was that patients’ and families’ voices, experiences, and views should be “at the heart of the review.” (Source: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3099)
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