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 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
- 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.
- We aim to promote a diverse and inclusive workforce, promote health and safety within our operations and provide a safe, respectful environment free of discrimination for our employees.
- We are committed to establishing and maintaining workplace polices that support our employees, as part of our Code of Conduct. In addition, we intend to formalise employee policies on areas that include:
- speak up process; and
- diversity, respect and inclusion.
- 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.
- We will look to review the emissions we control directly (Scope 1 and Scope 2) and seek to disclose our performance in line with the UK Government’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) framework in 2021.
- Our direct environmental footprint is limited, due to the nature of our operations; however we will look to evaluate our suppliers and how we may support them to reduce their impact in areas such as energy, waste and water.
- We will also explore ways of achieving our indirect emissions targets (Scope 3) in line with the NHS 2045 commitments.
