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Navigate NorthMarket access consultant, home

New Zealand market access consultant

Medicines and medical device reimbursement in New Zealand can be like climbing Everest. The summit is limited to a few.

We help suppliers navigate the process, diagnose the pinch points, and map a clear road forward.

Make an enquiryWhat we do
9 years
as Navigate North, working alongside NZ and Australian suppliers
15 years
leading NZ market access and commercial teams for a pharmaceutical supplier
B.Pharm
pharmacist by training, with a postgraduate diploma in clinical pharmacy
Rebecca Fuller, Principal Director of Navigate North

The approach

Not outsourced advocacy. Not a volume agency.

For nearly ten years I have helped suppliers, particularly those entering from overseas, navigate a New Zealand funding environment that is unfamiliar, high stakes and difficult to decode without local expertise.

The work is direct and senior. The person you speak with is the person who does the work. There is no account team and no junior analyst layer, and no attempt to hold on to knowledge that would be more useful inside your business than inside mine.

I take on a small number of engagements at a time, and I am straightforward about the ones where I am not the right fit. If your question sits outside New Zealand market access, I can usually tell you who to speak to instead.

More about Rebecca and the background behind this

The distinction that matters

Approval and funding are two different problems, solved by two different sets of people.

Regulatory approval

Medsafe assessment for medicines, or notification to the WAND database for devices. This makes a product legal to supply in New Zealand. It says nothing about who pays for it.

Handled by regulatory affairs consultants and in-country sponsors. Navigate North does not do this work.

Funding and market access

Getting a product funded, contracted, tendered or priced so that it reaches patients and generates revenue. In New Zealand that runs through Pharmac, Health New Zealand, and the private channel.

This is the whole of what Navigate North does.

How funding actually works

Pharmac does not assess against a threshold. It ranks against everything else.

This is the part that surprises most suppliers arriving from other markets. A strong application is not judged on its own merits and approved once it clears a bar. It joins a queue, and it is ranked against every other option competing for the same fixed budget.

A product can be good value and still wait, because other options ranked above it. Almost everything else about the New Zealand process follows from that one fact.

Read the full guide

Services

Five things suppliers most often need.

All services

Medical devices

Device funding in New Zealand is being rebuilt right now.

Responsibility for hospital medical device procurement is now split between Pharmac and Health New Zealand, with categories allocated between the two agencies and legacy contracts still moving across.

For suppliers this is an unusually difficult moment. The pathway for getting a new device funded is not the settled, documented process that applies to medicines, and the agency that assesses a category is not always the agency that holds the budget for it.

Navigate North works across both medicines and devices, in the funded and private channels, including private health insurance engagement. If you are trying to work out who to talk to and what they will want to see, that is a conversation worth having early.

Start a confidential conversation

Send a brief outline of your product, project or access question, and we can talk through your situation and whether the support is the right fit.

Make an enquiry