Access to Healthcare

Our commitment to sustainable healthcare

Significant breakthroughs in diagnosing and treating serious diseases, as well as improvements in the delivery of healthcare, have steadily improved health outcomes and increased life expectancy. Universal access to medical innovation and quality healthcare remains a global challenge and an ethical issue. Our aim is for every person who needs our products to be able to access and benefit from them.

Finding equitable and sustainable solutions to the global barriers to healthcare can only be achieved through persistent commitment and joint action by multiple stakeholders. It requires many players—public authorities, healthcare providers, patient organisations, non-governmental stakeholders, local communities and the healthcare industry—to work closely together.

As a global healthcare company, Roche shares a responsibility to tackle the challenges of improving access by overcoming barriers. We pursue sustainable and comprehensive solutions that are tailored to local healthcare needs. In addition to our key contribution as an innovator of new medicines and diagnostics, we focus on key factors which need to be in place to successfully improve access to effective, quality healthcare: awareness, diagnosis, healthcare capacity and funding, but also prevention, early detection and monitoring of diseases. We do this in order to deliver on our global access vision that aspires to enable broad, rapid and sustainable patient access to our innovative offerings.

As a general rule, we believe support improvements in healthcare systems has much more impact than product donations. Hence, drug and diagnostic donations are not a core component of our policy or practice to increase sustainable access to our innovative offerings globally.

All access programmes need to be compliant with all applicable laws, regulations and industry codes, including but not limited to topics such as pharmacovigilance, pricing policy, patient data protection, antitrust requirements and integrity standards related to interactions with business partners and other stakeholders.

We are all expected to:
  • Ensure that all access programmes are fully compliant with applicable laws, regulations and industry codes.
  • Collaborate in a transparent and responsible way with different stakeholders to enable access to our products and services.
Questions & Answers

What is meant by access to healthcare?

Our aim is that every person who needs our products is able to access and benefit from them. Thus we pursue sustainable and comprehensive solutions that are tailored to local healthcare needs, taking into account income levels, disease patterns, disease cause, political commitment to healthcare and healthcare infrastructure.

What do I do if I receive a request for free products?

Requests that Roche receives from organisations seeking medicine or diagnostic donations are evaluated for exceptional consideration only on an emergency basis and should be referred to the Corporate Donations and Philanthropy Department.

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