The pharmaceutical industry is responsible for the development, production, marketing and distribution of pharmaceutical products, which include medication and other medicinal products. The pharmaceutical industry involves both generic and branded medications.
The UK pharmaceutical industry
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the UK’s biggest industries – It is the third most profitable industry behind tourism and finance and contributes millions of pounds to the UK economy every year. The USA is the world’s largest pharmaceutical industry but the UK industry has an impressive global reputation, especially for research and development.
It is no surprise that the industry is booming when you look at the figures associated with the consumption of pharmaceutical products in the UK, every year more than 650 million prescriptions are written by GPs in the UK and the NHS spends more than 7 billion pounds on medication in England alone; 80 percent of this expenditure relates to patented medications.
Regulation of the pharmaceutical industry
It would be ideal to think that the interests of health organisations and patients were the same as those for pharmaceutical companies. However, this is not the case and consequently pharmaceutical companies are regulated carefully. In the UK, medications must be approved by NICE (National Institute of Clinical Excellence) – NICE works on the basis of evidence-based medicine, which is founded on the idea that only medications that have been found to have positive results in trials and those that are cost-effective with low risks of side-effects are used. There is some debate in the medical and pharmaceutical industries about the efficacy of NICE and the reliability of the evidence-based system, because the concept works on evidence alone and if some evidence is hidden or not published then prescribers do not have all the necessary information to make well-informed decisions.
In 2005 new regulations were introduced to promote patient safety, provide more information for patients, tighten advertising regulations and improve the efficiency of the complaints process.
There is also concern that society is becoming increasingly medicalised, with many people relying on medication and taking it when it is not wholly necessary. The pharmaceutical industry has been blamed for this in part but officials are keen to point out that the blame does not lie solely at their door. Patients are now more likely to self-medicate than ever before, with medication more accessible thanks to the increase in outlets providing over the counter medication and the internet, which allows people to buy medication without even seeing a pharmacist or doctor. Prescribers have also been implicated.
