CSR and Access to Healthcare Products: A Shared Responsibility

Equitable access to medicines and other health products is now a major social responsibility issue for all stakeholders in the health care system. Long viewed primarily through the lens of voluntary initiatives, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is undergoing a profound transformation driven by the combined effects of new legal requirements, growing societal expectations, and the development of tools for measuring and evaluating commitments.

In the pharmaceutical sector, this trend goes beyond the issue of corporate commitment alone to raise questions about the responsibility of the entire ecosystem: manufacturers, healthcare professionals, healthcare facilities and institutions, professional organizations, associations, and international actors. Access to healthcare products thus emerges as a shared responsibility, one that requires the coordination of corporate strategies, regulation, governance, and regional initiatives.

This seminar aims to analyze these changes by combining legal and academic perspectives, corporate strategies, and feedback from stakeholders on the ground. It will draw in particular on an international DELPHI survey—coordinated with Canadian partners—on CSR practices related to access to medicines, in order to compare international experiences with local realities, particularly in Occitanie.

Structured around four key areas—understanding the fundamentals of pharmaceutical CSR, analyzing corporate strategies, examining governance of access, and identifying regional practices and innovations—the seminar aims to foster a genuine science-society dialogue and contribute to the collaborative development of strategies that will enable the transition from commitment to effective and measurable improvements in access to health products.