We do not have all the answers to the access challenge. That is why we spend significant time with external stakeholders with other perspectives and experience. By listening to, and working with, groups such as the GAVI Alliance, UNICEF, Project HOPE, Oxfam, and African Medical and Research Foundation, we can learn a great deal. We are open to constructive dialogue with all organizations on ways we can do more and to collaborations that will help us move toward our common goal of achieving greater access and, ultimately, saving lives.

We are aware that various stakeholders are calling on the global pharmaceutical industry for greater transparency on the impact of access strategies and initiatives and evidence of how access strategies are integrated into an overall business strategy. We have sought to do this by developing and reporting on relevant indicators and articulating the business case for our overall approach.

We also recognize that there is a need for relevant industry-specific indicators that will allow comparisons across the industry.  Such indicators are beginning to be developed. One example is the Access to Medicines Index (ATMI), which ranked Merck No. 3 and the only U.S. pharmaceutical company in the top seven, in its inaugural index launched in June 2008.  Merck believes that the ATMI represents an important first step in this process but more work is needed to ensure indicators are relevant and provide true measures of corporate responsibility. Toward that end, we remain committed to working with the ATMI and other organizations, including the Global Reporting Initiative, to develop meaningful measurement tools for our industry.

The content on this page was last modified on September 15, 2009.

Merck & Co., Inc., Whitehouse Station, NJ, USA, and Schering-Plough Corporation, Kenilworth, NJ, USA, are now one company. We have combined our global operations under the name Merck & Co., Inc. We are working to update our corporate responsibility Web site to reflect our new, combined, global organization.