Jack Tame: External contractors won't fix Pharmac's culture problems

Pharmac’s board is backing the CEO and bringing in external contractors to help implement a plan to fix the organisation’s internal culture.

I get it, people make mistakes, we all understand that, but in my eyes, Pharma’s leadership has made a couple of massive errors in recent months.

The first — if you cast your minds back was the rollout of the Trikafta funding announcement. I personally just thought it was incredibly inappropriate that Pharmac appeared to turn the whole thing into a made-for-TV moment.

Medicines funding is so sensitive. Pharmac is literally making decisions about peoples’ lives. The whole Pharma model is supposed to remove emotion from the equation as much as possible.

So think about what making a made-for-TV Oprah-style moment means in the context of drug funding and medicines funding. It feels really, really icky to me and in my view, it only incentivises pharmaceutical companies to launch really big, emotional PR campaigns in order to get their medicines funded regardless of how much they cost.

Which ultimately undermines the whole purpose of Pharmac’s model.

But not only that, they appeared to very deliberately mislead journalist Rachel Smalley when she found out about the funding decision ahead of their PR moment and she started making calls.

And then the pièce de résistance: internal emails showed senior leadership making incredibly unprofessional comments about Rachel Smalley.

I just do not understand how you can rise to a senior leadership position in an agency such as Pharmac and not realise that your emails can be made public.

What does it say about the judgment of those leaders? Not just the comments, but that they made them in writing.

The external contractors might help to change the culture within Pharmac. Internally, they might be successful in making some big cultural changes.

But when it comes to an organisation like Pharmac, public perception matters just as much, if not more. And this won’t fix it.

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