Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones started her career as a Community Pharmacist in the UK Healthcare system and she quickly realised that her role was most valuable when she equipped people with the information and tools to understand their own health and the medicines that were needed as part of their care. She often spent time acting as the bridge between patients and their physicians since people frequently sought clarity and reassurance following their all too short appointments.

 

Passionate about imparting the insight she had gained at the “coal face” to clinical research, she joined a large pharmaceutical company where she has held a variety of executive roles in research, development and commercial functions. In her most recent role within AstraZeneca, Rachel has been charged with inputting the patient centric strategy as a Global, companywide initiative. One of her key land mark projects has been to facilitate a consumer charter for the company which was led by patients and their families to add insight and direction to the way in which a large corporate body conducts its business.

She has also worked with cancer survivors to facilitate the development of technology solutions to integrate into their daily lives and she currently works with patients in a rare disease setting to co-create clinical trials. Rachel’s work directly with patient activists and campaigners in the UK and US has inspired her to embark on authoring a book to help make information once only available to decision makers available to patients in an understandable format. She is also mid way through her masters in Behavioural Change and is the senior author on a peer reviewed manuscript which was published in the BMJ in 2016 in relation to patient centricity.

 

More recently she has been part of a working party which endeavours to define the type and extent of information to be made available to the general public by Pharma companies and Research Institutions so that clinical trial results are more widely circulated.

 

Her belief that cutting edge therapies and services should be more readily available or at least better understood by lay people is one of her core values. She believes that working with consumers and patients to co-create rather than simply second guess the consumer creates benefits for all parties. It remains her passion to connect the patient view with corporate and academic institutions and to facilitate the flow of information between each.

 

A link to her peer reviewed manuscript is found below:

Paper published in BMJ Innovations to evaluate the collaboration between Pharma and patients