Responsibility

Shining a light on our work in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

March 2024

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MSD’s Chief Diversity Officer, Celeste Warren, strives to ensure that our policies and practices provide an equal opportunity for all so that our workforce reflects the diversity of the world. This she says “enables us to better understand the needs of the patients, health care providers and customers we serve,”

And that means embedding a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion at every level of the organisation, a commitment that’s central to our business growth as well as to our employees’ well-being.

At MSD in the UK, our work is more than just scientific: we recognise that we have an important part to play in tackling health disparities to drive improvements in healthcare access and outcomes for patients across the UK.

We believe in creating a more equitable and inclusive society where everyone has the best chance of staying healthy and well, regardless of their background, identity and circumstances. 

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are at the centre of everything we do and is part of our ways of working.  Our employees with shared experiences and their allies come together as Employee Business Resource Groups (EBRG’s).  Providing a community and informing change across our business, our EBRGs help everyone at MSD bring their authentic selves to work, and ultimately champion and drive improvements externally in our mission to save and improve lives.  

Prioritising diversity and inclusion benefits employees and our business

We’ve made a lot of progress on our diversity and inclusion efforts in our workplace, including:

    • Strong membership growth across our 10 EBRGs  globally with approximately 21,500 employees who belong to EBRGs, and many of our UK employees are active participants.
    • Launch of an internal Ally Resource Centre to provide access to resources and educational materials to support each employee’s D&I learning journey.
    • Development of an integrated disability inclusion strategy to create a disability-confident workplace culture where people with disabilities feel accepted, connected and can fully contribute.
    • An annual UK Health Equity hackathon, hosted by our LEAD network (League of Employees of African Descent) in collaboration with Eli Lilly’s embRACE brings together over 55 undergraduate students from a range of diverse academic and cultural backgrounds, inviting  curious minds to ‘hack’ the problem of health equity, explore potential solutions, and network. As well an increasing awareness of health equity, the event contributes to a pipeline of diverse talent as the winning group are accelerated through the early talent programme assessments.
    • Our UK EBRG’s have recently driven the implementation of a new ‘Transitioning At Work’ policy, a new ‘Menopause Policy’ and a mandatory ‘Sexual Harassment’ training programme for all employees
    • MSD is proud to be a member of the Patient Information Forum (PIF) and are part of their Trusted Information Creator accreditation scheme (the PIF TICK) – the UK’s only quality mark for health information. We commit that our public-facing materials are produced in line with PIF’s criteria, ensuring that our information is accessible and accurate.

We are on a journey, and are proud to be shining a light on our work so far. Watch our video and follow our stories on social media over the coming weeks.

GB-NON-09023 | February 2024