Engaging with and for patients

At UCB, we build strong connections with people living with severe diseases, to identify the most promising innovations by seeing the person and not just the disease. We maintain these connections by continually partnering with patient communities across all stages and domains of the medicine life cycle.

Our vision for patient engagement is rooted in the ambition that creating value with and for people living with severe diseases should be the norm in healthcare. At UCB, we ensure that we partner with patients, their caregivers and representatives across all stages of lifecycle of our solutions, from early research to post launches. By implementing patient engagement into our core operations, we ensure that patients' voices are heard, and their insights are integral to our decision-making.

The UCB Patient Engagement Framework supports this ambition, enabling a systematic, continuous, and consistent engagement, ensuring that patients' needs, experiences and preferences are always front and center. For specific patient populations, engagement plans are tailored at global and national levels to account for geographic particularities. We also ensure that patient perspectives are integrated by including patients as non-voting members on our Benefit Risk Board and by listening to our employees who live with severe diseases.

To evaluate our reputation for patient engagement, we rely on feedback from patient groups through our Annual Patient View surveys. The survey considers indicators such as transparency, patient centricity, patient-group relationships, involvement in R&D, patient information, and patient safety.

Moreover, patient organizations, individual patients, their caregivers and other patient experts have designated patient engagement leads, to whom they can raise any questions or feedback. Specific questions on diseases or products are answered via the UCBCares program.

 

Last April 2024, UCB teams and people living with hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) engaged in at the first UCB-organized and funded HS Patient Partnership Summit at UCB headquarters.