As a medical doctor who’s come to the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Paul Robinson has a first-hand perspective on what better patient involvement means. He shares his thoughts on what needs to be done and opens up about his personal goals, saying,“I want us to develop good medicines.
I want my colleagues who are prescribing to be able to prescribe something that patients appreciate. We need to give the doctors the tools that answer the needs of the patients.” Dr. Paul Robinson is the R&D Director for EMEA Region at Merck Consumer Healthcare.
“When I was a little boy , if I went to the doctor, I was given a bottle of medicine on which it just said: ‘The Medicine’. It wasn’t even considered necessary for the patients to know the name of the medicine they were taking. They just did as they were told.
So we have come a part of the way through the journey, where patients are much more partners and they are given some choices about the medicines that are available and maybe they and their doctors make the choice together.”
In the video below Dr. Robinson explains how much we still need to do: “We have come a long way from the ‘Doctor knows best’ approach, but we’ve got a little bit further to go”.
Watch the VIDEO below:
About PFMD: The Patient Focused Medicines Development (PFMD) group, established in 2015, is an independent multinational coalition, managed in collaboration with The Synergist. Its goal is to bring together initiatives and best practices that integrate the voice of the patient throughout the lifecycle of medicines development, thereby speeding up the creation and implementation of an effective, globally standardized framework. Find out more about the initiative: https://patientfocusedmedicine.org/about-pfmd/.
