About Pharmaceuticals

The UK is at the forefront of the worldwide Pharmaceutical industry which is essential in helping to improve the health of the UK population, it carries out research into potentially lethal diseases such as aids and HIV and converts them to manageable chronic conditions as well as discovering, developing, making and selling medicines.

About 67,000 people work in the UK pharmaceutical industry, many are chemists, biologists and pharmacists others are engineers or manufacturing operatives.

New medicines take about twelve and a half years to go through tests before they can be prescribed by a doctor or are freely available to buy.

People who work in the pharmaceutical industry are in general very enthusiastic about their work and care about making other peoples lives better. Working in the industry is very much a team effort from discovering the drug at the beginning to promoting it when it has been fully tested and is ready for the market place.