A healthy return

We are not just in the business of selling pharmaceuticals," insists Dr Ahmed El Hakim, senior manager of Pfizer's Middle East Arab Group (MEAG). "We are in the business of continued medical education.

"Worldwide, the planet's largest research-based pharmaceutical company provides treatment for over 38 million patients a day. It employs 100,000 staff including over 12,000 medical researchers, and in 2006 recorded revenues of US$48.4bn. Not bad figures for the education sector.

In the Middle East, the company operates in 14 countries, and covers a population of 270 million people from its Cairo headquarters. Around 1200 staff are tasked with the challenge of cracking a market which has traditionally been slow to adopt new pharmaceutical products - and El Hakim, who is also director of external affairs and policy at Pfizer, is determined to increase the pace of change.

"Our proudest contribution is bringing these new innovative breakthrough medicines to the patients as soon as we can," he asserts. "We are actually working with ministries of health across the region on the fast-track registration of new products, and the formula now in most countries is ‘FDA (US Food & Drug Administration) or EMEA (European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products) plus 90 days'.

"In some countries, including the UAE, this objective has been achieved, but in others we are still waiting," he continues.

"The longest period of regulatory approval at the moment is in Saudi, but we are working with the new Saudi FDA on achieving this important goal."

El Hakim admits that the registration of new products in the Middle East is a slow process, but emphasizes that the Gulf states in particular are making positive progress.

"We are moving forward, but to a great extent the delays have been a result of government bureaucracy and the duplication of laboratory work - where a lot of time is spent in the labs of the ministry of health, on things that have already been done in more advanced countries like the US or in Europe," he explains. "Another reason is the constraints on healthcare budgets - governments don't want to use new products if they think there is no need for a new product on the market, because they think that there are already similar products or similarly-acting products."

The theme of education is a crucial one, and El Hakim returns to it time and time again.

"There needs to be more awareness of health issues within the Middle East, particularly with chronic diseases," he insists. "For example, in the case of a lipid profile of patients (with high cholesterol), usually patients are on therapy for one month which is only one-sixth of the time they should be. This requires compliance and extreme awareness."

To this end, Pfizer has constructed a state-of-the-art national training institute in Cairo to help upgrade the level of physicians and their support staff. ‘Project Hope' marks a major cooperation between the private sector and the government, and has also commissioned a prominent NGO to work on the development of the curriculum and training. In tandem with the American Heart Association, that credits trainees at the centre, Pfizer promises to ‘fast-track' students.

"I think now that most of the governments are focusing on education as the main pillar to success, we expect even better improvement in the future," explains El Hakim. "It's always a difficult task to find the right people, but we do invest in this and we spend a lot of time and effort finding the right staff."

"Mostly we rely on locals - very seldom do we get expats from overseas into key positions," he insists. "Over the last 10 years we have shifted towards local talent, and we work very hard on improving the skills and knowledge of our employees."

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