Prescription for Growth
As America entered the 20th century, there were few drugs in the nation’s medicine chest. Doctors did what they could to make patients feel better, but disease was clearly in the driver’s seat. Diseases such as diphtheria and whooping cough sometimes claimed whole families, and pneumonia and influenza struck like lightning and spread like wildfire. The average age of Americans at death was 47.
The Pharmaceutical Industry in the 21st Century
As the world enters the 21st century, the pharmaceutical industry is adapting and equipping itself for a new set of formidable tasks. Globalisation, consolidation, profit pressures, demographic changes, and unprotected market share are just some of the forces that will require a highly skilled, well-managed, competitive workforce to maintain profitability and sustain momentum. Sales within the United States by both U.S.-owned and foreign-owned research-based companies accounted for $105.6 billion of the 1999 total.2 But the medicine chest is not growing in America alone. The current worldwide market for pharmaceuticals is estimated at $265 billion, and could double or triple by 2002. With the majority of the world’s population still under-served by pharmaceutical therapies, international sales will be a significant growth channel in the next century. Developing nations with rising living standards, especially Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and Eastern Europe, are accelerating their use of pharmaceuticals as the first line of medical sources of advantage. While these competitive market forces are likely to benefit therapy. Globalisation of the industry will continue to test old ways of doing business.
At the end of the 20th century, total health care became a cooperative venture among many participants—medical personnel, health-care facilities, insurance providers, managed care providers, health maintenance organisations, and patients—and the pharmaceutical industry played a key role. Statistics show that the domestic ethical drug industry employs more than 500,000 people worldwide doing research, sales, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution. The phenomenal and constant expansion of the industry has required corresponding growth and change in the employee base that is the foundation of that success. The increased complexity of the pharmaceutical sales process and the increased needs of the organisation to outmanoeuvre the competition and win profitable business in an era of cost containment, heightened competition, and increased consumer awareness are all creating new challenges.
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