The Royal College of Nursing has ended its commercial partnership with Teva UK after pressure from Nurses for Palestine and UK Healthcare Petitions to Royal Colleges. Teva will no longer sponsor the forthcoming nursing event on migraine and headache services. A union representing more than 500,000 nurses has refused to continue this relationship, and the pharmaceutical giant has discovered that healthcare is being “politicised”.
“Healthcare is at its best when it remains focused on patients rather than being politicised,” its spokesperson declares.
Let us examine this concern for the patient. In 2024, the European Commission fined Teva €462.6m for blocking competitors to Copaxone, its treatment for multiple sclerosis. The conduct extended across seven European countries and lasted between four and nine years. Here was a company protecting its position in the supply of a medicine by preventing other companies from competing with it. The patient’s need for treatment furnished the market; the company defended its hold upon that market.
For four to nine years! The nurses are now invited to accept a lecture on keeping healthcare focused on patients from the company responsible.
In 2023, Teva agreed with the US Department of Justice to pay $225m in fines as an alternative to prosecution after being charged with fixing the prices of three drugs. In 2016, it agreed to pay $519m to settle civil and criminal charges involving the bribery of government officials in Russia, Ukraine and Mexico. Over the past decade, fines and other payments imposed by European and US authorities for bribery, price-fixing and abuse of its market position have amounted to about £1bn.
Bribery reaches into the machinery of government to secure an advantage for business. Price-fixing uses agreement among sellers to restrict competition over what buyers pay. Blocking competitors preserves the position of the firm already occupying the market. In each case, the practical question concerns power: the power to influence an official, determine a price, exclude a rival. Government, markets, the terms on which necessary medicines are sold: the company’s own affairs lead us straight into politics.
Yet when nurses use their organisation to challenge a commercial relationship, Teva objects to politics entering healthcare. Its objection begins precisely where somebody else’s organised power begins to inconvenience it.
Teva UK is the British arm of Teva Pharmaceuticals and one of the NHS’s biggest suppliers of medicines. The company invokes this position in defending its relationship with the RCN. We should take the fact seriously. A supplier of necessary medicines occupies a position upon which other people depend; the greater that dependence, the greater the importance of examining how the position is used. Teva would have its contribution to supplying medicines count in favour of its commercial partnership. Its record gives the nurses ample reason to examine the terms on which it conducts that business.
Under capitalist ownership, the patient’s need appears to the pharmaceutical company as demand for a commodity. The medicine must possess a use: it must treat an illness. But the company owns the product in order to sell it, and its control of the conditions of sale becomes a means of securing revenue and profit. A medicine can be essential to the patient while the business supplying it pursues arrangements hostile to the patient’s interests. All the talk of shared concern for health leaves this relationship intact.
Social ownership, with working people controlling the priorities of production, would make it possible to organise medicines around a different calculation: which treatments are needed, what capacity exists to produce them, and how that capacity can be developed and allocated. Research, skilled labour and reliable supplies would still have to be organised. Those are real tasks. Under such a system, knowledge and productive capacity could be shared to meet the need for treatment. Teva’s protection of its position in the Copaxone market shows the opposing calculation at work: another producer’s capacity to supply the medicine becomes something the existing seller seeks to obstruct.
The campaign against Teva also concerns its links to Israel’s military. Nurses for Palestine put their objection plainly: “Teva has no place sponsoring professional bodies dedicated to healing, care and preserving human life.” UK Healthcare Petitions to Royal Colleges challenged commercial relationships with companies linked to sustaining state systems accused or found by international bodies to involve crimes against humanity, apartheid and genocide.
Teva answers with the patient, as though the patient were someone whose interests could be confined within the boundaries of a sponsorship agreement. Nurses have every reason to examine the connections of a company seeking association with their profession. Their concern for human life cannot be made to stop at the point where Palestinian lives enter the discussion. To impose that boundary would itself be a political decision, and a very convenient one for the commercial partner.
International solidarity acquires practical force through decisions of this kind. Nurses in Britain possess an organisation, a professional standing and relationships over which they can exert pressure. The campaign has brought a question concerning Palestine into one of those relationships and secured a definite change. Teva has lost a commercial partnership it wished to retain. Its disappointment measures something quite material.
The RCN leadership explains the decision through due diligence and professional values. In her letter to Nurses for Palestine, council chair Carmel O’Boyle said that further checks had identified operations subject to legal sanction and public scrutiny which were incompatible with the values of the RCN and RCNi, its publishing and education arm.
The dates deserve attention. The bribery settlement was reached in 2016; the price-fixing agreement in 2023; the European Commission fine in 2024. The partnership has now been ended after pressure from organised campaigners. Those campaigners have accomplished the work of making a professed standard bear upon an actual business relationship. A declaration of values is easily accommodated beside a sponsor’s name. Applying it may require removing that name. The nurses pressed the matter to this consequence.
The value of the decision should be stated precisely. It ends a commercial partnership and removes Teva’s sponsorship of the RCNi nursing leadership summit on migraine and headache services at the union’s London headquarters on 30 October 2026. Its immediate force lies in withdrawing the association with a large nursing organisation which Teva had valued. Professional standing has a use for a corporation; otherwise the corporation would have little reason to regret losing the relationship.
Campaigners are now calling on the Royal College of Pharmacy to remove Teva UK as a sponsor of its forthcoming annual conference and cancel its exhibition stand. The RCN’s decision gives that demand a concrete precedent. An existing commercial arrangement can be contested, and organised healthcare workers can help bring it to an end. Each professional body approached by the campaign will have to decide what its own declarations mean in practice.
One sentence in O’Boyle’s letter is particularly useful: “The event will go ahead as planned.”
The nurses will still meet to discuss migraine and headache services. They can attend to patients’ needs without lending Teva their name.
