Sustainability as a supplier to the pharmaceutical industry
A medical communications company or a freelance writer is a supplier to the pharmaceutical companies it writes for, and this leaf answers what that position now means for sustainability: why clients count their suppliers' emissions, what leverage a supplier holds, and what a consultancy's own commitments look like. Measuring the supplier's own number is in measuring a practice's carbon footprint and setting a target, and reading the sustainability reports clients publish in reading and writing corporate sustainability claims.
Expect clients to count their suppliers' emissions
Kimi Uegaki, editor of The Crofter, EMWA's sustainability column, put the point in supply-chain terms in the journal's March 2023 issue. Introducing an interview with Amy Booth, she reminded readers that medical writers and communicators who serve pharmaceutical companies are part of those companies' supply chains, and Booth's own list of what a supply chain contains includes marketing and communications companies. The same column relayed news from Oxford PharmaGenesis's chief executive that the US Department of Health and Human Services had announced at COP27 a plan, joint with NHS England, to align procurement requirements on emissions and energy use, covering pharmaceuticals. The March 2023 issue of Medical Writing (volume 32, number 1, on clinical trials) was admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair; its known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text.
The same argument reaches a supplier from the other direction. David, who heads environmental health and safety, sustainability and business continuity for Thermo Fisher Scientific's clinical research group, told EMWA's 2024 expert seminar on sustainability in healthcare that the company's mission statement is to enable its customers rather than to make its own products — it owns no drug product, manufactures on behalf of customers and runs trials on behalf of sponsors — so the climate goals its pharmaceutical customers set are what drive its own, and helping those customers meet their scope 3 targets is the service it is selling. A medical communications company sits in exactly that position with respect to the same customers. The seminar's record is Vimeo's uncorrected automatic captioning, so figures and organisation names in it are approximate.
Paul Tisdale, a communications director at Oxford PharmaGenesis, gave the supplier's side of the same relationship in EMWA's June 2023 freelancing issue, as reasons rather than as leverage. As a service industry, healthcare communications must respond to its clients' needs in business practice as well as in project delivery, and on sustainability there is an advantage in moving ahead of the wave of change rather than reacting to it. The commercial reason is that pharmaceutical companies are embedding sustainability requirements throughout their value chains, and recent guidance had indicated that alignment with their goals would become a standard consideration in sourcing decisions: in the year before he wrote, several companies had clarified what they required of suppliers, such as auditing and disclosing carbon emissions through sustainability monitoring platforms like EcoVadis and publicly committing to science-based targets through the Science Based Targets initiative. Policy pressure adds government measures such as ultra-low emission zones and frequent-flyer taxes, which may force changes in business practice; and the ethical reason, environmental stewardship for future generations, matters to current and prospective employees who want an employer with forward-thinking and shared values. As with other changes in the business environment, acting early may be more cost-effective and less painful than acting later. The June 2023 issue of Medical Writing (volume 32, number 2, on freelancing) was admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair; its known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text.
The practical position of the sector is modest in absolute terms. Most providers are small and medium-sized enterprises or sole traders with lean operations and low absolute emissions, most of them needed for essential operations. Auditing a company's footprint is the essential first step in benchmarking, monitoring and reporting progress, and it can be done through several platforms, of which EcoVadis had begun to gain industry-wide recognition, which matters for a consultancy with many clients. Pharmaceutical companies were also offering suppliers help: the Energize programme was set up by a collaboration of industry-leading pharmaceutical companies to engage suppliers and support them in adopting renewable energy and reducing supply-chain emissions through power purchase agreements. Switching to a renewable energy supplier, with or without client support, is on his account one of the most effective ways for a healthcare communications consultancy to cut its footprint and should be a high priority.
Use the supplier relationship as leverage
A medical communications company is a supplier to the industry it writes for, and Amy Booth, a University of Oxford researcher on the pharmaceutical supply chain's carbon footprint, told the seminar that the position is more powerful than the profession assumes. The three levers that move a company not yet engaged are money, regulation and reputation: put a price on sustainability, regulate it, or demand it visibly enough that not having it costs something. A supplier can pull the first directly, and her example is a medical communications company that gave its pharmaceutical clients a discount where they could demonstrate that they were sustainable — influencing the buyer rather than waiting to be told. Holding a validated target of your own works from the other direction, because a client with a scope 3 target needs its suppliers to have one; being a good supplier in that sense is how Gemma Rogers, a medical communications practitioner on the seminar's closing panel, frames the same relationship.
Joining an existing initiative is preferred to founding another one, with a caution attached. Booth's concern about the many collaborations in this space is whether they are having a positive impact or are a place for people to say they are doing something; her advice is nonetheless to join rather than reinvent, and she names a sustainable markets initiative healthcare task force and an industry environmental hub among the options. What makes agreement possible, on her account, is that the environment is pre-competitive and urgent enough that the argument about what the problem is has no place — and that doing something is better than doing nothing.
What a consultancy's own commitments look like
Chris Winchester, chief executive of Oxford PharmaGenesis, added to Tisdale's June 2023 article a statement of where one consultancy stood that year. Oxford PharmaGenesis aimed to be an industry leader on sustainability, facilitating and educating others, and described the push as driven by the company's mission and its employees' values, not only by client direction. It had recently been re-evaluated by EcoVadis and awarded a Silver medal, placing it in the top 25% for sustainability performance, after a Bronze in 2021; it was in the process of committing to science-based targets and would set near-term targets that year, overseen by its environmental management team; it had conducted research with the University of Oxford evaluating major pharmaceutical companies' emission reduction targets, the content analysis of 20 companies' public reports that the article cites; and it was a member of the Sustainable Medicines Partnership, a not-for-profit collaboration aiming to make healthcare more equitable and sustainable. It is a company describing itself, and its ratings and commitments are its own account as of June 2023.