Pharmaceutical sales reps: from 25,000 to 9,000 in ten years

CORRIERE DELLA SERA / BLOG – 20 APRIL 2017 | Of The editorial staff | by Sabrina Spina

A love and hate relationship. On the one hand the passion for scientific information, on the other the dynamics of a sector, the pharmaceutical one, which have led to a drastic reduction of the category, with an impressive downsizing: in Italy in the last In 10 years, the scientific representatives of the drug have gone from 25,000 to 9,000.

Explains Antonio Mazzarella, national president of the Italian Association of Scientific Drug Representatives:

«Ours is a wonderful job, very rewarding for which it is necessary to be highly qualified. We are not sellers. We treat drugs that from a technological point of view represent the most sophisticated and advanced product on the market. Biologics, increasingly widespread, have characteristics such that in order to provide scientific information one must be highly prepared and qualified. Or let's think, for example, of therapies for rare diseases: we need to know the subject very well, we are dealing with single people rather than with diseases. Unfortunately, companies, for reasons of savings, underestimate the human relationship of trust that only we can establish with the doctor. They try alternative forms of communication, but none are as effective as the one between us and the doctor.'

«Businesses forget - Mazzarella continues - that this job is for those who have a passion for science and medicine, even if they are not doctors. Young people who want to approach the profession must be passionate about chemistry and pharmacology".

Today the barrier to entry into a large pharmaceutical company is much more difficult than it was years ago, but once in there are good opportunities for both horizontal and vertical growth. "It's not uncommon for whistleblowers to grow up to become corporate executives."

But now that health issues, such as vaccines, even become a topic of political struggle, what function can whistleblowers perform? «I think we have a great opportunity - replies Mazzarella - we could be more active in controlling the information that circulates on these topics; we are close to the territory and to the citizen, so we can help stem the false information that circulates. We would like companies to use us as a means of communication in this sense as well».