The World of Skills

Medicine gets personal

Derek Willison-Parry, Vice President, Operational Excellence, Global Manufacturing and Supply, GlaxoSmithKline.
Derek Willison-Parry is responsible for performance improvement of the global network of GSK factories and suppliers delivering more than 4 billion packs of medicines each year, worth more than $40bn in sales. Derek is a mechanical engineer who joined GSK from the nuclear industry in 1990 as a project manager in UK and China, since when he has gained experience working in various senior roles in the UK and abroad.
To what extent have skills been a source of strength to the UK pharmaceuticals industry?
Skills are the primary reason the UK industry is a world leader in the global market for pharmaceuticals. Strong scientific and technical capabilities, combined with a strong focus on healthcare, have underpinned the industry’s global expansion.

People, together with their skills and intellect, have always been the key component in GSK’s strategy, which is constantly evolving to meet the increasing demand for better healthcare worldwide.
What are the significant changes the industry faces in the coming years?
Until the 1990s it was the so-called “blockbuster” drugs for treatment of problems such as heart disease and diabetes that funded our expansion. However, many patents have expired in recent years, providing opportunities for cheaper, generic versions – this is also reinforced by the worldwide drive to get even more value from healthcare budgets.

The major development in recent years has been a move away from “one disease, one drug” to a much more personalised approach to medicine which is fragmenting the pharmaceutical market, bringing a much longer list of drugs with it. A good example is the treatment of breast cancer, where once only a handful of drugs were used. Drug development is now much more sophisticated, and a much broader range of drugs is aimed at treating the specific variants and lifecycles of this disease.
What combination of skills and knowledge are needed to bring these newer products effectively to market?
The discovery of new medicines is a dispersed and diverse activity that very often takes place outside the industry itself – in universities and specialist research and development ventures. The science underpins everything we do, and our people need to understand it in order to manufacture our products effectively and efficiently. We are now making smaller volumes, and this means our people need to get to grips with advanced technology where the parameters of operation are more complex and need more close attention. There is a much greater need to understand pharmaceutical processes rather than to tolerate the “black box” approach to process control.
What do you perceive to be the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest challenge?
The manufacture of drugs in smaller quantities, and to extremely exacting standards, is demanding an all-new “factory of the future”, where autonomous teams of people with an all-round understanding of the science and the process support the supply of an ever-increasing range of drugs. We need to get research and development closer to manufacturing, and to link science into process operations at the point of manufacture on the shop floor. This is a new challenge in terms of the skills and knowledge required from our people and will demand higher level skills as we move forward.
How do pharmaceuticals employers currently conduct training and development?
Training and development is delivered in a plural way within the pharmaceutical industry. The industry is very heavily regulated and this has encouraged a large amount of specific operational training to be done in-house, with vocational training and development more likely to be available through the traditional external means.
The Government is refocusing higher level skills strategy with its “HE at Work” strategy – what is the industry view of the supply of higher level skills in the UK?
Universities play an important role in supplying skills to our industries. What we need to see is a real focus in terms of meeting our unique needs – and most importantly we need the education to be relevant and up-to-date.

The Government is right to make its investment in high level skills. But it’s not just about skills – ideas are the bedrock of the industry and this is where we need to step up. Singapore, for example, has the “bit between its teeth” and there is a real pharmaceutical focus between academia and business, plus there’s the recognition that the business environment has got to be right too. It’s risky to make comparisons, but we need to learn from this approach.
Looking ahead to the future together with the role of Cogent and the Skills Academy, will these initiatives fulfil a need for a co-ordinated approach and national platform?
We need relevant and up-to-date vocational qualifications. The developing Foundation Degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences will not just be “nice to have” – it really needs to be in place, to provide the skills and knowledge our industry needs to thrive and innovate.

We must have the right skills applied in the right operational environment in order to guarantee a long term future for UK manufacturing. Cogent and the Skills Academy will play a very important role in ensuring what we get is demand-led. The industry too must play a leading part in these developments as part of its wider strategy to deliver managed and sustained growth and retain its place in the world.