Unlocking New Horizons: How a Chemistry Degree Can Propel Your Career in Healthcare Consulting

Did you know that a chemistry degree can open doors to an exciting career in healthcare consulting? If not, you certainly aren’t alone, and this article aims to share experiences from our colleagues who have followed this path. We will also highlight how this degree can set you up perfectly for a fulfilling and impactful role in the healthcare sector.

It is a common misconception that a chemistry degree leads only to a career as a chemist, researcher or teacher. At Costello Medical, we have a number of colleagues, especially within our Health Technology Assessment (HTA) division, who have come from a chemistry background and they have been reflecting on how their degree has equipped them with many transferable skills.

Our HTA team focuses on communicating the value of a treatment with the aim of securing patient access to it. This often takes the form of large-scale documents, such as reimbursement submissions or value dossiers, as well as interpreting health economic models built to estimate the long-term health and cost impacts of making this drug available via publicly funded healthcare systems, such as the NHS.

In our experience, the technical nature of a chemistry degree compliments our HTA team’s work, which focuses heavily numbers and highly technical concepts. More generally, at Costello Medical we value diverse academic backgrounds as this brings diversity of thoughts and viewpoints to our work.

Transferable Skills From A Chemistry Degree

Any role within healthcare is challenging, especially within healthcare consulting; the sector is ever-changing and the consultancy setting asks you to divide your efforts across multiple projects at one time. This means that the role draws on a diverse set of skills from technical and problem solving skills to softer skills like teamworking, communication and adaptability. Below are just a few examples of the skills our colleagues draw on daily, after developing them during their chemistry degree.

“I enjoy the technical and challenging nature of our work, which can require you to understand and write about anything from complicated treatment pathways used in different countries, to statistical methods comparing treatment efficacies, to economic modelling methods of estimating a new drug’s value, often all in the same day.” – Jacques Morgan

• Attention to detail: Any time you work with healthcare data, a meticulous attention to detail and focus on quality is crucial to ensure your key messages are accurate. This is especially true for our HTA division who often present their work to large organisations such as NICE in the UK or ACE in Singapore. Ultimately, any errors in the team’s work could result in a treatment or therapy not being easily accessible to patients, so accuracy is vital.

“One of the most important skills I developed during my chemistry degree was attention to detail, a skill I continue to use every day in my role. Lab work and adherence to experimental procedures were crucial in honing this ability, as even the smallest errors could significantly alter the outcome of my experiments.” – Alice Reading

• Numerical skills: Our HTA team work on very technical projects which use complex data, such as treatment prices and cost implications as well as health benefits and quality of life measurements, to analyse the efficacy of treatments. As a mainly quantitative degree, a background in chemistry allows you to hone your numerical skills and can often make you comfortable when working with numbers and large data sets. ?

“The work we do in HTA is very technically challenging. Every project faces different, unique challenges that we approach analytically and critically, which allows you to become really familiar with the data and the evidence base. I think this is what makes HTA such a good fit for me; I spent most of my degree working with numbers and data, as well as complex calculations and experiments. Ultimately, my degree made me comfortable interpreting data which I can draw on in my role now.” – Fern Woodhouse

• Analytical skills: A key part of healthcare consulting is analysing data from a variety of sources, such as clinical trials or patient level data, as well as interpreting and communicating this. This is not too dissimilar from running chemistry experiments, where you are asked to analyse and interpret the results to draw meaningful conclusions.

“The ability to assimilate and understand information, and subsequently summarise and synthesise it, whether in writing or through graphs or tables is a crucial part of this role. Working with data, numbers, equations and more during my degree was surprisingly useful for this!” – Jacques Morgan

Step Into A Rewarding Role

The key reason why many graduates join healthcare consulting firms is the direct impact their work can have. Whilst chemistry research can, at times, feel intangible and disconnected from the final result, HTA projects put you front and centre in the mission to improve patient outcomes.

“HTA allows me to use my scientific skills, and my interest in medicinal chemistry to be at the front-edge of that drug development process. The work that we do actively supports and leads to patients being able to access new therapies” – Fern Woodhouse

If you are a current chemistry student or recent graduate who feels a role in healthcare may suit them well, as well as drawing on your transferable skills, our team have some advice that can help to set you up for your future career.

1. Tailor your degree: Reflecting on her degree, Alice said that she always found the “medicinal chemistry option modules the most interesting” because they were when she saw how the “science I loved could be used directly to help people.” If possible, try and select optional modules that focus on medicine or healthcare to begin developing your awareness of this sector.
2. Get experience working in a team: Fern reflected that “academia can sometimes feel quite isolated – you have your lab group, and you might have a team working on similar projects, but it’s usually very independent.” When comparing this to her current role, it couldn’t be more different. “Every project here is part of a team and you get that satisfaction in sharing achievements together and pushing each other forward.” We therefore recommend getting as much experience of working in a team as possible, to help build these crucial collaboration skills.
3. Don’t be afraid to make the leap: Finally, when beginning his career in healthcare consulting, Jacques “initially found it quite challenging, as this was a very different environment to the academic, lab-based environment I was used to.” However, his advice is to be brave and take the leap because, with experience, he “eventually started to understand the work more and more”.

“The work we do has a real tangible impact on patients’ lives. It is so rewarding to work on a submission for a treatment that then goes on to receive a positive recommendation from NICE as it means that we have played a significant part in making that treatment available on the NHS. This ensures that hundreds, sometimes thousands, of patients can now access that treatment for free. Knowing that the work we do directly contributes to improving patients’ health is extremely motivating.” – Alice Reading

To learn more about careers Costello Medical, please visit our career pages, explore our current vacancies or email [email protected] to speak to our team.

Quotes provided by Alice Reading, Fern Woodhouse and Jacques Morgan who all joined Costello Medical's HTA division after studying Chemistry at university.