The speakers will be John Lehal from Inside Public Affairs and Gayle Sawyer from Packer Forbes.
Packer Forbes is a healthcare consultancy focusing on healthcare communications with expertise in a number of areas including market access and policy.
Insight Public Affairs is a Public Affairs, Public Relations and Corporate Communications agency that provides a more comprehensive list of services, but also provide healthcare sector offerings.
They will be holding a joint careers forum on the 5th June between 6pm-7pm where they will focus on ‘old versus new challenges in communications’ in today’s healthcare environment.
John Lehal is Managing Director of Insight Public Affairs, a 15-strong political communications and public relations agency. He advises some of Europe’s leading blue chip companies on their government and political relations strategies, as well as supporting charities and the voluntary sector. Since launching the agency in 2006, the team have triumphed in numerous industry awards and have enjoyed a consistently high profile in our sector press. We are regarded as a progressive agency, that has been a major success since our arrival on the scene. John’s clients include Betfair, Emirates, International SOS, Pfizer and Skills for Care, and John provides pro bono support to several charities. A former parliamentary candidate, following the 1997 election John spent two years working in Parliament before moving into consultancy.
John frequently speaks at conferences and seminars on issues relating to politics and public policy and has been recognised by Total Politics magazine as one of the UK’s leading lobbyists. He writes regularly in the media, including for The Times on public policy and public sector issues including civil service reform, third sector commissioning, the Big Society, Parliamentary Committees, and public sector reform. In 2011, John chaired an independent Commission on behalf of the PRCA on Diversity and Broadening Access to the PR industry, and the report made 30 recommendations for implementing across the industry. John serves on the Management Committee of the Association of Professional Political Consultants and is a member of the Strategy Board of Intern Aware: the campaign for fair internships.
Insight has an established pedigree in successfully developing and executing strategic, innovative and results-focused public affairs programmes. At the heart of Insight’s approach is the way in which the agency works extremely closely with clients to ensure that commercial objectives are realised through these targeted programmes.
Gayle Sawyer With over 17 years’ experience in healthcare communications, Gayle plays an integral role in developing strategic and innovative PR programmes for several of the agency’s accounts.
During her career Gayle has worked on a variety of communications activities across a broad spectrum of therapy areas including infectious diseases, mental health, respiratory, rheumatology and pulmonary arterial hypertension. Her expertise has generally focused on implementing patient and public awareness campaigns, new product launches and KOL advocacy programmes.
For Gayle, the opportunity to work on disease awareness campaigns, which can help people access vital information about a particular disease and lead them to receive better care and treatment, is meaningful and fulfilling.
Over the last six years Gayle has enjoyed Packer Forbes’s supportive environment and the way the team draws on wide-ranging healthcare experience to deliver PR programmes that can help to improve people’s lives and health.
“We work hard to deliver the Packer Forbes promise. We offer a personalised and flexible service that allows for every PR programme to be adapted when there is a change in the external environment and influences.”
On a personal level, Gayle is able to apply her organisational and project management skills in her own home where she manages the lives of her two young children.
Gayle began her career with Edelman Worldwide. She then moved to Hill & Knowlton for six years where she was responsible for a number of national and international communications programmes and spent a year in the company’s Sydney office. On her return she joined Grayling where she headed up a number of healthcare accounts, then moved in-house at GSK supporting the global antiviral team. Her move to Packer Forbes took place in 2001.