A Yellow Card for the Yellow Card scheme?

The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is today launching a six-week campaign to get community pharmacists to mention the Yellow Card (YC) Scheme when they talk to their customers about their medicines.

The Yellow Card report system is used to identify side effects and other issues with medicines which might not have been known before. The MHRA typically receives around 20,000 Yellow Card reports of suspected side effects annually.

While this campaign should undoubtedly be applauded and encouraged, I found myself asking, “Does it go far enough?” and “Will this really significantly raise patient awareness of the Yellow Card scheme?

Acting like a fairly typical patient, I thought I’d Google ‘Yellow Card’ to see how easy it would be to report a side effect. I found out lots about a rock band from Jacksonville, Florida, but had to delve rather deeper before I was able to find and access the MHRA’s perfectly functional (although not particularly patient-friendly) website.

OK, it’s easy to criticise, so I started to think about how best to really spread the message about the Yellow Card scheme amongst patients. If we think of this as a type of ‘customer service’, then there is a lot to be learned from other industries. Pick up any supermarket product and you’ll likely find a small box which says, “Questions? Comments? Call 0800-XXX-XXX”. Why couldn’t a similar system be implemented across the industry for all products, with a central call-centre service available to take patients through the reporting form?

In their book, “A Complaint is a Gift – Using Customer Feedback as a Strategic Tool” (1996), Barlow & Moller argued that customer complaints can give businesses a wake-up call when they're not achieving their fundamental purpose - meeting customer needs. Apply this to the pharma model, and the same surely applies? Most patients will tell you that they want medicines which control their condition without the debilitating side effects. And side effects are a major contributing factor to poor compliance.

The pharma industry is often accused of distancing itself from its end customer – the patient – and yet here is an opportunity for them to interact, and prove that they really are interested in what the patient has to say…

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Di Stafford is Director of The Patient Practice Ltd, a consultancy specialising in patient marketing, communications and relationship management. www.thepatientpractice.com

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