Management Training is Key to Success in Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industry
(PRWEB UK) 27 June 2013 -- The Executive MBA (EMBA) at Cambridge Judge Business School furnishes senior executives with the knowledge and skills they need to play a leading role in their organisations. And to an increasing degree, it’s a programme that is finding favour with professionals in healthcare and the pharmaceutical sector.
Professor Stefan Scholtes, Dennis Gillings Professor of Health Management, and a tutor on the EMBA at the School, believes that the programme is an ideal fit for top executives in these fields. He says: “When you look at these two sectors, the pharmaceutical industry and health-service delivery, both are dominated by professionals – scientists in the former case, doctors in the latter. And I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people without a formal grounding in management to cope with the challenges.”
It is a sentiment with which Lynne Murray would agree. Now Head of Biology at the AstraZeneca subsidiary MedImmune, she began studying on the Cambridge EMBA in 2011. Previously, she was director of pharmacology at Promedior and a research scientist at Centocor (now Janssen Biotech). She says: “Because I’m a researcher who’s more associated with the laboratory, the main reason I did the EMBA was for corporate finance. The best part of a previous job I had at a smaller company was the interaction with investors: putting together a commercial case, NPVs, and seeing how they worked.
“At the time, when dealing with corporate finance people I’d often think, ‘That’s amazing – how do they do that?’ After a couple of sessions on the EMBA programme, I realised it was actually back-of-the-envelope stuff. I’m a numbers person, and understanding that aspect of business has been amazingly valuable.”
A current student on the Cambridge EMBA, Ian Abbs is Medical Director of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. He has held a broad range of senior clinical and management positions, and joined the trust in 1994 as a consultant renal physician. He believes that there is a pressing need to professionalise medical leadership, and ensure that doctors in management positions have the skills appropriate to their role. He says: “Many clinicians have taken on increasing roles of managerial responsibility, but there hasn’t been the concurrent development of education to qualify them for these jobs.
“One way of achieving that is through an MBA programme. It gives you not just the technical skills but also the development skills for management practice – the self-awareness, the reflective thought that doesn’t come with a course that just teaches you to understand the balance sheet.”
Abbs had particular reasons for choosing the Cambridge EMBA. “I like academic rigour and evidence-based policy – so I like the rather scholarly approach to of the programme, where it is backed up by course material that has an evidence base.”
Professor Stefan Scholtes cites several reasons why the Cambridge EMBA programme is particularly appropriate for entrants from both the pharmaceutical and the health sectors. “One aspect is that we have an excellent biopharmaceutical elective,” he says. “It tackles the vital questions: where the biopharma sector is going, and what needs to happen for companies that struggle enormously with profitability to become engines of progress again.
“We also have excellent connections with the local health systems. So if Cambridge EMBA students want to do projects with hospitals or in the commissioning environment, we can easily make that happen.”
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Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
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Notes to Editors
About the Cambridge Executive MBA
The Cambridge Executive MBA is a stimulating and practical 20-month programme offered by Cambridge Judge Business School, and is designed for senior managers who want to continue working while earning a Cambridge MBA degree. It builds on the strengths of the acclaimed full-time MBA programme, and offers rigorous general management training with a range of customisable elements.
http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/emba
About Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
Cambridge Judge Business School is internationally recognised as one of the leading providers of innovative, intellectually challenging and practical business management education across a portfolio of undergraduate, graduate and executive programmes. As a fully integrated department of a world renowned university, Cambridge Judge Business School hosts one of the largest concentrations of interdisciplinary business and management research activity in Europe. Built on an ethos of collaboration, the School is a unique place where policy makers, regulators, industry leaders, not for profit organisations, entrepreneurs and academics can meet, interact and share ideas. Cambridge Judge Business School delivers business education for the 21st Century networked economy, fostering collaborative leadership skills, developing communities of partners to meet the challenges of the new global business landscape.
http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/
Helen Maher, Cambridge Judge Business School, 01223 764 219, [email protected]
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