An Exploratory Study of Working Conditions of Medical Representatives in India

Medical representatives are responsible for promotion of drugs to doctors, on behalf of their pharmaceutical organization. In India there are about 0.3 million medical representatives. There are believed to be 20,000 pharmaceutical organizations in India out of which the top 250 companies contribute to 70% of the Pharmaceutical industry turnover, which was around 21 billion dollars in 2010. The present study focuses on working conditions as well as compensation and other benefits ojfered to medical representatives. The study involved a survey of 91 medical representatives (or 91 pharmaceutical companies). Literature review has not given any significant results in this study. The study is exploratory in nature. The study found that Indian pharmaceutical companies offer low levels of compensation as well as other benefits to medical representatives and hence they are dissatisfied by their companies and want to change their companies. Majority of them want to change to some multinational pharmaceutical company. The working conditions are quite demanding and involve long hours of working. The survey will be very useful for the pharmaceutical companies as they will know about the compensation and working conditions of Medical representatives across the industry and hence take appropriate steps to improve the working conditions of their Medical representatives. Further research is required to find out deeper factors which affect the working conditions of Medical representatives. The limitation of the study was that the research was carried out only in the city of Mumbai and adjoining areas.