Get well soon?
A report today by the BBC confirms what many of us have been expecting. The NHS has a big problem looming. Now I’m not an economist and my understanding of the financial levers required to prop up the economy in a downturn are pretty non existent, but I do understand what has happened before. Recessions hit tax revenues (less people working) and so the Government has less to spend. Even if we ignore all the other stuff like quantitative easing and budget deficits the simple fact remains, money is tight, and its going to get tighter. Add to this an ageing population, the threat of pandemic viruses and a grossly over-administered system the impact on the health service has no choice that to be considerable. Inevitably the spectre of large scale cost cutting, drug tariff pressure and even new drug prescription caps become the norm. There is no doubt in my mind that our industry and our clients business are in for difficult years as soon as the election is called. The policy maker the BBC interviewed called it 7 years of pain from 2011 . In my humble opinion the industry future requires us to be more innovate in the way we plan and launch new treatments, more cognisant of who needs to have meaningful relationships with medicines and more accommodating of the multiple layers of influence that will become normal. It’s true that innovation normally is more prevalent in crisis and whilst no one welcomes what is going on, I am confident that through adversity will come opportunity. We need to mirror the radical reform that our principal customer will undergo, recognise that doing what we have always done will not change anything and embrace the need for new thinking. Thankfully, that’s sort of why we set up…
