- 3 years ago
4 October 2023
“Diversity is important, but only inclusion unleashes the power of diversity and if you truly want to innovate, again this only comes through true inclusion,” says Urs Vögeli, Managing Director of Janssen Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).
A Swiss national, Vögeli arrived in Australia a year ago to lead the Janssen ANZ affiliate. Last month he visited a remote Indigenous community, the outback experience reminding him of a period spent in South Africa as a 10-year-old where his father, a church pastor, took the young family of five on sabbatical.
Posted with a multiracial church in Durban at a time when apartheid was still widely practised, for a young Urs the experience was life-defining and continues to have a lasting impact both on the man he is, and how he leads.
“The church was ethnically very diverse,” he says. “As a 10-year-old, I could see the disparities. Why was I allowed to swim at Durban Beach but not my black friends? In health, people were also treated differently and that had a huge impact on me.
“It left me with a love of different cultures and an eagerness to engage with them, but also aware of social justice and the importance of acknowledging the privilege I have and the need to find purpose in listening, understanding, and having a conversation.
“While I was visiting West Arnhem Land, I had so many flashbacks to my time in South Africa. Here was a completely different culture and I can’t say I understand their issues, but we could listen, ask questions and try to understand what solutions we may bring while working to empower the community.”
This early exposure to racial diversity and social exclusion left an indelible mark on Vögeli, as did another life-defining experience – compulsory military service in Switzerland. Recruited at age 20, Vögeli chose to serve with the Rescue Unit and was soon promoted to Sergeant, tasked with leading a team of young recruits – none of whom wanted to be there.
“I decided to be honest with them,” he says. “I took them aside one by one and put to them that it was better for us to work as a team. I tried to bring in purpose, a vision, to help them understand the value of collaboration.”
When Switzerland was hit by record snowfalls, Vögeli’s team was called upon to assist mountain villages impacted first by massive avalanches followed by record floods. It was in this environment the young leader saw the value of effective teamwork leading to a lasting belief in collaboration and purpose.
Achieving change for Australia
Vögeli recently nominated for a seat on the Medicines Australia (MA) Board, the leader intent on building on this foundational understanding that in bringing together people from diverse backgrounds with a common purpose, it was inclusion that had the power to release the true potential of any team.
“Diversity is important for better innovation and better collaboration, but only inclusion releases the power of diversity,” he says. “Through my early experiences and through working in an innovative industry, I found only through creating an environment where everyone feels safe to speak up and to bring their ideas can you truly release the power of diversity in your team.
“We will never succeed in overcoming the challenges we face as a company or as an industry if we don’t unleash the power of inclusion. I surround myself with people who are better, smarter, cleverer than me, who have different viewpoints and feel safe to challenge me.”
Before moving to Australia, Vögeli served on the Swiss Interpharma industry board and was involved in a public campaign designed to demonstrate the value the innovative medicines industry brought to Switzerland.
He also led an industry project looking at alternative pathways to deliver faster-funded access to new medicines. From these experiences, he saw the importance of going public on important issues, and that “you have to disrupt a bit, to think outside the box”.
Vögeli has based his campaign to join the Board on these learnings, calling on the medicines industry to decide what issues are non-negotiable and for which it is prepared to fight, and then to determine what the enablers to change are.
“I’m not here to tell people what is going wrong and what the solution is,” he says. “I see myself as a connector who challenges the status quo, who can drive alliances and partnerships and maybe bring some new ideas from the experiences I gained in various European markets.
“This is a unique country, a unique system with unique challenges and benefits and while there is no perfect system, we should not be arrogant as to say we have nothing to learn.
“Some markets are more advanced than Australia when it comes to bringing innovative medicines to patients and where countries have found solutions that achieve a fair balance between what is good for patients, what is sustainable for budgets, and what is attractive for industry to invest in innovation, we should look at what we can learn.”
Achieving a fair balance
In looking to achieve such balance in Australia, Vögeli believes the industry association needs to engage non-member companies so the sector can speak with one voice on areas of commonality while building cross-sector alliances to support the “big ticket items that are non-negotiable, on which we are willing to fight hard, to go public”. For Vögeli, the ‘big ticket’ items fall into three areas.
First, he believes Australia needs to take a value-based approach to the assessment of medicines, saying the current system pays for the pill and not the outcome while Australia’s approach to health technology assessment (HTA) restricts the ability of global corporations like Janssen to offer affordable innovative medicines to low- and middle-income countries.
Second, he advocates for a separation of PBAC decision-making and budget negotiations, saying the body that decides whether a medicine offers value should not also determine whether it is affordable while third, he wants appropriate risk-sharing between companies and the government, ensuring faster access to the medicines that deliver the outcomes Australians value.
“Not every new medicine has to reach patients, but the ones that bring real value should,” he says. “Australia needs to have clear rules. Currently, the HTA is highly complex and that complexity blocks change because those who own the complexity can always argue you just didn’t get it fully right.
“There is value in creating a framework that reflects not the innovation we brought to market 10 years ago, but the innovations we are bringing today and tomorrow and in this, Janssen has extensive experience that we feel others can learn from. We are a broad, innovation-based company operating in five big therapeutic areas, while we’re also very active in a lot of rare disease areas. We have cell and gene therapies, a lot of biologics, and small molecule drugs.
“What we need is a system that is future-focused, that truly values innovation, but at the end of the day, it has to be balanced. It needs to be both attractive to innovation, fair and equitable for patients, and sustainable from a budget perspective. That’s where we want to land.”
©MedNews 2023