Véronique Chabernaud's Career
A unique triple training and expertise
I have a postgraduate education in medicine (cancer specialist) and in biology that allows me to apprehend the stakes of health, to understand its causes and to analyse and synthesize the scientific data in order to establish relevant strategies and meet these stakes.
I also have a business training (ESSEC) and management and marketing experiences. I managed marketing teams and a big business unit. I can therefore apprehend needs and challenges of a company on strategic, managerial and financial levels.
I then attended a very innovative course, the “Master for the Development of the Ethical Leadership - Cabinet Recherches et Evolution.
Objectives and contributions of the Master for the Development of the Ethical Leadership
This Master is intended to generate relevant paradigms shifts in order to contribute to the positive resolution of the current great worldwide challenges.
During this course, I learned to provide positive support to executive teams in order to enable them to establish a vision and to implement innovative and ethical strategies taking into account both economic performance and global human needs.
An extensive professional experience
I had, in the pharmaceutical industry, medical and marketing responsibilities, at national and international level and I have both a great strategic and operational experience.
At these posts, I implemented a very motivating and ethical management that enabled the teams to launch, achieve and perpetuate relevant innovations. The most significant and recent of them were, in oncology, a very differentiating marketing through the services it offered, a true “brand” that included training programs for physicians and healthcare workers (physician-patient relationship training, patient information) and also a very innovative approach of Congresses and their educative mission, in which physicians were involved in generating a pedagogic synthesis.
In a great pharmaceutical group, I launched a wide program in order to support primary prevention actions “Agir pour la prevention” (“Acting for prevention”), while this was not obvious in this professional context, even less at the moment of a merger.
Others relevant experiences
I give lectures on prevention for the general public in order for everyone to acquire the basic knowledge about the control of his own health.
I lead health workshops in the Paris region schools and I am chairwoman of the association I founded “Enfance et Vitalité” (“Children and Vitality”), which aims at developing these workshops all over France, by myself and with the help of volunteers, mainly parents.
I am secretary-general of the association Savoir-Etre et Education (« Interpersonal skills and Education) and I am health consultant and facilitator at the innovative nursery school:Living School.
“Agir pour la Prévention”, an illustration of Ethical Leadership in action
In the context of the merger of two pharmaceutical groups, a travelling exhibition about primary prevention had been planned, a corporate image operation.
Face to the striking prevention needs in France, I was convinced that an exhibition, however good it may be, could not generate behaviours changes. I therefore suggested that the exhibition should be supported by the promotion of real prevention actions, making thus the prevention positioning of the company credible and consistent.
An ambitious project arose, “Agir pour la Prévention”, with the aim to federate regional prevention actors and to set up primary prevention initiatives. These projects would be submitted to a national committee that would decide to which of them funds would be allocated to by the company. Within a very short time, very high standard requirements have been established in order for the applicant projects to be of very high quality, innovative, with sound methodology, including multidisciplinary actors who were not used to work together, and measurable, especially within one year.
I got the go-ahead from the CEO, together with the allocation of one million Euros for this initiative while the company was right in the middle of budget synergies.
Many field teams in the company were very enthusiastic for the initiative and 33 projects have been submitted in the various French towns where the exhibition was presented. The regional company representatives were in charge of providing support to the participating teams.By jury decision, seven projects have been awarded and supported. Nevertheless, many other have been eventually carried out. The groups had indeed created such a dynamic that they found the means to achieve their project.
In total, more than 50,000 persons across France were reached by the 7 awarded projects, most of them being for children and families. “Agir pour la Prévention” has been considered very effective and it has been renewed after I had left the company.On April 2009, 4 of these projects have been presented at the “Prevention Days”, the annual Congress of INPES (National Institute for Prevention and Health Education).