This week, we interviewed Chommonica Pech, Head of Regulatory Affairs and Quality at Zuellig Pharma and Co-Chairwoman of EuroCham’s Healthcare Committee. Monica has extensive experience in the sector and talked to us this week about how she’s working to help improve it!

EuroCham: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you get involved in healthcare in Cambodia?

Monica: Sure, my name is Monica, and I’m married with two lovely kids. I like traveling and working out at the gym or at home in my spare time. My journey in healthcare started with earning my pharamcy degree in Cambodia in 2011, and later I earned a master’s degree in 2014 from the University Paris Descartes master’s program at Hanoi University.

For the past eight years, I’ve been working for Zuellig Pharma, a leading pharma healthcare services provider in Asia and in Cambodia, where I work as Head of Regulatory Affairs and Quality. In this role, I’m able to connect with many of our internal and external stakeholders, including the Ministry of Health and the Department of Drugs and Food.

My job entails ensuring that all Zuellig products are stored correctly and follow the strict guidelines of the company, manufacturers, and government agencies.

EuroCham: What are some things that could be improved in Cambodia’s healthcare system?

Monica: There really are so many opportunities to improve the system in Cambodia. If we think of long-term solutions, we need sustained economic growth, better accessibility to the healthcare system, modern well-equipped medical facilities, and more digital solutions.

In my opinion, we need to continue education programs to train more healthcare practitioners. I believe this well help improve the overall system, and increase transparency and trust from the local population in the Cambodian healthcare system. It might also help reduce medical tourism, which we see a lot in Cambodia, for those in the middle to upper classes. They go to Vietnam, Thailand, for Singapore for treatment, and we lose quite a lot of money on this.

Besides that, educating people on general health knowledge and organizing disease awareness campaigns will help increase preventative care and promote early detection of diseases.

As we continue to serve the community, Zuellig Pharma has continued to upscale its cold chain capability to ensure we deliver very safe and quality products to the patients. Increased cold storage capacity will help ensure the safety and authenticity of medicines used in Cambodia.
 

EuroCham: As the co-chairwoman of the Healthcare Committee, what issue would you like to see pushed forward?

Monica: Now the committee has three co-chairs, instead of one chairperson. There’s three focus areas we want to work on: the pharmaceutical industry, digital health, and healthcare providers.

As co-chairwoman representing the pharma industry, the goal is to really consolidate and understand common challenges faced by pharma companies and find out how we can transform these challenges into opportunities by partnering with the Ministry of Health to find a win-win solution that benefits the public healthcare system in Cambodia.

This includes complying with the MoH’s regulations, and at the same time finding chances to discuss the challenges of implementing some of the regulations, ideally before they are signed off on and made effective. Besides that, our goal is to build professional relationships with the MoH by having regular dialogues with them, inviting them as speakers to our events, and hosting networking events.

As the new pharmaceutical law is being drafted, we might expect to see new regulations for digital health, detailed advertisements in the industry, regulations on product variations, and perhaps more online registration options.

We thank the MoH for already implementing import permit requests and cosmetic product registrations via online platform. We have more clarity on the status of our submission hence the shorter approval timeline. We hope the online registration of pharmaceutical products, medical devices will also be go-live or activated again soon.

EuroCham: Could you tell us about the homologation procedure?

Monica: Yes, we are currently working on mapping the requirements of product registration between EU countries and Cambodia. The idea is to see what the additional requirements in Cambodia are to register a product and how we can make this process quicker for products that have already been registered in EU countries. This will be another topic that we will bring to the MoH to discuss and listen to their considerations. 
 

EuroCham: What projects at Zuellig are you most excited about?

Monica: Well, I have to say ZP has many exciting projects underway at any point in time. You definitely don’t feel bored working at ZP, the company keeps me busy and I’m constantly learning all of the time.

If I must choose one, then I will say the integration of ZP and Alliance Pharma in 2020. At that time, we saw a lot of change for both companies. Processes and structures changed, facilities and systems were upgraded, and spheres of control shifted. I was very involved in this journey of change and it was my duty to help manage it and turn it into a success. It was very memorable.

I’m happy to report that together, we have continued to grow and evolve!