Fishburn Hedges’ head of health joins AstraZeneca

Fishburn Hedges has announced that Ayesha Bharmal is leaving her position of board director and head of health at the agency in order to take up a role at AstraZeneca.

Ms Bharmal helped to establish a 12-strong dedicated healthcare team at Fishburn Hedges in March 2011, offering comms advice for healthcare clients such as Celesio and Novartis with support from an expert advisory panel of NHS clinicians and managers.

She will now move to pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to become its global media director from February 4th 2013, handling proactive media relations and UK corporate communications.

Following her departure, Fishburn Hedges has not confirmed a replacement for Ms Bharmal at this time.

Fishburn Hedges chief executive Fiona Thorne told PRWeek that the agency will continue to grow and expand its healthcare offering, thanks to its model of utilising "specialist expertise in sectors and disciplines, but with no formal boundaries or silos".

Other healthcare sector clients of Fishburn Hedges include Lloydspharmacy and the Department of Health.