Environmental, Social and Governance commitment

Essential Pharma’s business has always been driven by a desire to help patients continue to have access to the medicines they need. As our business continues to grow, we commit to staying true to our founding principles of supporting patients with continued access to drugs.

We also recognise the growing expectations relating to our broader social responsibilities, and the role our organisation should play in addressing these. To meet these expectations – from our employees, owners, suppliers and customers – and to grow our business sustainably, we are implementing a robust approach to managing our ESG performance.

A focus on the issues that matter most

We are committed to continually improving our ESG performance in the areas that matter most to our business and its stakeholders.

Based on an assessment of the pharma sector in which we operate, we define these areas as being:

Working ethically

Working to high standards of ethical behaviours, internally and externally, should form the basis of all our interactions with our stakeholders (which includes patients, employees, healthcare organisations, customers and shareholders). Working in this way is essential if we are to deliver on our purpose.
When we talk about working ethically, we mean:
- Working with integrity in all business activity, to enable us to continue the supply of generic and branded pharmaceuticals in a way that complies with local laws and regulations
- Working fairly, so that the interests of stakeholders are balanced when we make decisions
- Working transparently, so that stakeholders understand how we have made our business decisions
Our Code of Business Ethics reflects our desire to conduct our business in an ethical and transparent manner. It is applied to every aspect of our organisation to ensure the sustainable supply of effective, low volume, branded and generic pharmaceutical products. It covers all elements of our business, including our boardroom strategies, how we treat our employees and suppliers, our pricing considerations and our accounting practices. It means that we support the behaviours of integrity, transparency, accountability and respect. Our Code of Business Ethics applies, without exception, to all employees and contractors acting on our behalf.

Ensure continued and sustainable supply of high quality, well-established medicines across Europe and in other international markets

We invest in medicines to ensure continued long-term supply of tried-and-tested lower volume pharmaceuticals that are at risk of future withdrawal by larger companies. Despite the presence of newer treatments, many of these older medicines are still relevant and important for a small number of patients. We seek to save these medicines from being abandoned, investing significant resources to ensure continued regional stock remains available through locally licensed supply, or exported where locally licensed supply is not possible. Across the many countries in which we operate, we work with National Health Service stakeholders to ensure these important therapies are commercially positioned to remain on the market sustainably for the long term.
We acknowledge the need to offer more clarity and transparency around our approach to pricing. We are developing a specific policy and governance framework around ethical pricing to meet the expectations of our stakeholders.

Supporting our employees

We benefit from a diverse and inclusive workforce, promote health and safety within our operations and provide a safe, respectful environment free of discrimination for our employees.
Through our Code of Business Ethics, and other HR and Compliance policies, we are committed to establishing and maintaining workplace policies that support our employees. Examples include offering agile working and providing a one-off hardship allowance to all members of staff to help them adjust to the cost-of-living crisis.
In addition, we are formulating employee policies on a broad range of initiatives including our Speak-up process, Equal Opportunity and Inclusion, Wellbeing, Anti-bullying and Harassment and several others.

Playing our part on environmental issues

The UK Government’s 2050 net-zero commitment, alongside the NHS’s net-zero 2045 target, sets a clear long-term direction for the pharmaceutical sector.
We acknowledge our responsibility to support these goals, and the ultimate need for us to become a net-zero carbon business ourselves. Moreover, climate change represents a significant risk to human health; it stands to reason that we want to be part of a sustainable future.

View our Environmental Policy here