Continuing our series on Professional Identity and Medicines Development, we are pleased to feature another well-written essay by a talented student of our 2022 cohort, Ho-Jin Lee.
Ho-Jin Lee is a Senior Medical Manager in Internal Medicine at Pfizer Korea, Seoul, South Korea. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy (BSPharm) from Seoul National University, as well as a Master of Public Health in Healthcare Management and Policy (MPH) from the same institution. Before joining Pfizer, she worked in Medical Affairs and Marketing at a global pharmaceutical company, in addition to her clinical role as a pharmacist at a university hospital.
“Discuss Professional Identity and the Sense of Purpose in Medicines Development and their relevance for professionals involved in the field.”
Professional Identity can be defined as a set of knowledge, understanding, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes about an individual’s professional role, responsibility, and capacity based on their personal, educational, social, and work experiences. Since Professional Identity is constructed and developed in the social context, an individual might form the basis of their Professional Identity from their childhood social interactions. In this regard, especially in the Medicines Development field, Professional Identity can be described as deep-dive knowledge and understanding of science and healthcare across diseases and medicines, beliefs of benefit for patients, and behaviors and attitudes towards clinical development and clinical practice, based on accurate and well-balanced data throughout the process of Medicines Development.
Professional Identity is highly significant for professionals to be imbued with a sense of purpose. However, an individual’s sense of purpose is not always aligned with those of the organization. An individual involved in the process of Medicines Development usually desires a profession, such as quality of clinical trials, scientific data, and evidence, while the organization naturally gives priority to pursuing profitability from sales of medicines.
Professionals working in the pharma industry are required to build and develop enduring relationships and collaborations with academia, medical societies, patient advocacy groups, healthcare systems, and even governments and payers all over the world. Since professionals should gather insights from various stakeholders and identify unmet needs, it is important to advance a powerful Professional Identity that enables an individual to enhance competence and be confident about his/her job, career, and profession, and also enables him/her to have a strong sense of purpose, resulting in ultimately improving patients’ outcomes. In order to do so, well-organized need-based continuous educational training that gives insights into skills that would be useful in Medicines Development, as well as cutting-edge scientific subject matter including disease, diagnosis, management, treatment, and relevant knowledge, are prime examples.
Professionals involved in Medicines Development may have diverse professional identities and a sense of purpose depending on their professions and stages of the life cycle of drugs. Medicines Development experts with expertise in certain therapeutic areas are especially required to exchange scientific insights with customers and understand unmet medical needs to maximize the value of a drug throughout its entire life cycle. Thus, their Professional Identity and sense of purpose can be expressed on well-balanced and directed scientific data and evidence and independent medical activities including in-depth medical-to-medical communication regarding pipelines as well as in-line products. Additionally, since professionals from cross-functional teams are usually working within multidisciplinary teams, they should always consider a compliance framework under laws and regulations when planning and executing their duties such as clinical studies, regulatory filings, advisory board meetings, manuscript development and many other activities.
Disclaimers
- The material in these reviews is from various public open access sources, meant for educational and informational purposes only
- Any personal opinions expressed are those of only the author(s) and are not intended to represent the position of any organization(s)
- No official support by any organization(s) has been provided or should be inferred
