Celebrating National Mentoring Day: A Q&A with mentor Dr Felix Jackson FFPM

In celebration of National Mentoring Day (Sunday 27 October 2024), Dr Felix Jackson FFPM, one of the dedicated mentors on our FPM Connect platform, shares his insights and values of mentorship. Here, he reflects on the people who have influenced him, his motivations as a mentor, and the significance of mentorship.

Please can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your career?

I am a doctor and entrepreneur developing digital solutions for the health and care sector. I trained as an Anaesthetist in the UK gaining my MRCA with the Royal College of Anaesthetists. Then, I left clinical practice to start working in digital health and pharmaceutical medicine, becoming a Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine.

I founded medDigital with Paul Gardner in 2008. The medDigital team members are specialists in digital communications with expertise in healthcare. We combine insightful science with seamless digital communications to overcome healthcare challenges and transform patient lives. We work with many different organisations, including charities, the NHS and life science companies.

I am also a Visiting Lecturer in Pharmaceutical Medicine at King’s College London lecturing on the Medical Affairs MSc and helping with a new research program that will establish a published evidence base for the practice of pharmaceutical medicine and medical affairs.

I have mentored many people within medDigital, at KCL, and within pharmaceutical companies. And, I am supporting the PM Society Careers Interest Group. I often find myself supporting health professionals and scientists move from clinical practice and academia to working within the Pharmaceutical Industry.

Dr Felix Jackson

Were there any mentors (or other influential people) who made a significant impact on your early career? What was so notable about your interactions with them?

Yes! I have had the opportunity to be mentored by many amazing people. I think the most important time for me was when I transitioned from clinical medicine, where I worked in anaesthetics, to a career in pharmaceuticals as a pharmaceutical medic. Eric Lefevre and Kate Thomson were two very important people who supported me immensely in my first Industry job at GlaxoSmithKline. And since then, I have also stayed in touch with Karren Mullen who has been a huge support as I have steadily gained experience and responsibilities over my career. All of these amazing mentors, and others, have helped me understand what works well as a medic working with big teams in different companies on big budget projects (and most importantly, what doesn’t!).

What motivated you to become a mentor via FPM Connect?

I want to help people navigate the complexities of pharmaceutical medicine to get started with their career and take it in the right direction.

How do you hope to make a positive impact on your mentees?

I hope I can help them find which part of pharmaceutical medicine works specifically for them, as there are so many choices open to us as industry medics. We can choose different therapy areas, products, technologies (medicines, devices, biologics, etc), stages of the product lifecycle, countries, companies, events, agencies, regulators, professional organisations and even simply the different people we choose to work with. So much choice is liberating, but bewildering!

In what ways do you believe being a mentor has made you a better leader or colleague?

Through helping others, you start seeing things from their perspective and broaden your own. This then helps you advise them on the challenges they face by sharing your insights and discovering new ways to overcome your own challenges by learning from theirs!

As an early adopter of FPM Connect – which aspects of the platform have you found most helpful in getting you started?

It is a very straightforward platform that was easy to use and only took me minutes to get up and running as a mentor. I found it very easy to keep in touch with my first mentee to start the mentoring process.

Looking back on your career (so far), is there something you wish you had known early on that you hope to pass on to your mentees?

I have learnt so many things, so it’s hard to pick only one, but I only recently realised, through my work with the FPM’s Global Forum, that Pharmaceutical Medicine is the only truly global specialty. This means that we work with global organisations on global challenges, and this is something very special for us to keep in mind during our work. We really can work anywhere in the world.

What do you believe is the most important message about mentoring that should be highlighted on National Mentoring Day?

I think it is really important that we all continue to broaden our perspectives on diversity and ensure that we are always being inclusive. The only way that we are going to overcome all the challenges the world faces, is by all of us working together. Social media and politics seem to polarize opinions and create barriers between groups. We need to break down these divides and restart conversations to find ways to collaborate.