Saturday, December 03, 2005

Feeling holier than thou?

Well, hell yes. That's what this blog is all about, no?

Yeah, I suppose it seems that way at times. But now I'm actually feeling pretty good about the Firm, and I'll explain why.

I recently attended a forum where members of my department gave feedback to management about all sorts of issues, about which our management was found lacking, in one of those bi-annual workplace satisfaction surveys that my company conducts for all employees.

During this forum, I had a sidebar discussion with a physician, about the safety review process at our company. This is where all of our safety data is reviewed annually for each drug, and changes are made to the drug's labeling. He said that our company was the first he's worked at where there was no commercial input in this process. It is left entirely to the safety physicians to determine the contents of the safety sections of the labels. He had worked at four other companies, and singled out Wyeth as one where the sales organization had the largest impact on the safety review process. We have several other Wyeth alumni from the mid 90s, and I asked them how much the sales organization affected the safety group back then. They all just smiled, shook their heads gently, and walked away. I wonder why?