“The relationship with patient associations is one of the fundamental pillars of a pharmaceutical company’s strategy today. There is no innovation without this innovation becoming accessible to them. And the role they play in helping us make it possible for the system adapts and is able to give access to new drugs and innovation.Today we are learning to listen to them more and their request is to no longer be passive subjects, but to be active subjects in the search for solutions , right from the phase of defining the clinical trial protocols, which must also answer questions that come from the experience of the first user of the drugs, up to the definition of services to support the patient, family and caregivers in the administration and follow-up monitoring”. This is the picture outlined by Valentino Confalone, Country President and Chief Executive Officer of Novartis Italia, on the sidelines of the presentation of the Report on the enhancement of the Allied for Health volunteer network, today in Milan.
It is a snapshot of the impact generated by the activity of 5 associations of the Allies for Health network, involved in a strategic alliance that Novartis started 15 years ago. “The dialogue with the associations that represent the patients’ interests is fundamental – the manager points out – and it must be a dialogue that gives them an active role, no longer just passive listening but really involving them in the decision-making process. While we have historically an ability to do research, develop innovation and communicate our innovation, in the last 10 years we have also learned to collaborate with institutions to evolve the health system and make it more efficient, or at least do our part to make this happen”.
If there is one point where there is still “a lot of work to do – he admits – it is precisely in improving our ability to listen to patients. We are good at working with them on the support part in the administration and monitoring phase, the therefore phase of the use of a drug. We must become better at the initial listening phase, that is, when we go to identify and define clinical protocols for example”. Confalone mentions the ‘patient-reported outcomes’: “The results of the drug in terms of benefit perceived by the patient, often qualitative rather than quantitative, are an element on which we have only just begun to question ourselves, both pharmaceutical companies and institutions. Here, this is an area in which we must learn to become more sophisticated and more precise in identifying the appropriate solutions that serve to improve the patient’s quality of life as he perceives it, not as it is perceived through the clinician, and through that that we pharmaceutical companies can understand”.
Without the Third Sector, he concludes, “it would really be a healthcare system probably with more important gaps. The numbers presented today struck me greatly: over one million hours of work by patient association volunteers, 70,000 guaranteed free visits, a of nearly 20,000 volunteers” on the field. “In short, a fundamental impact, without which the health system, put under pressure by budget constraints, by sustainability issues, would have been more difficult to address those existing gaps”. “In this the Third Sector really does a very important job”.
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