Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4102

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Santell JP, Birdwell SW, Scheckelhoff DJ.
Perception of the role of medical-service representatives in hospitals.
Am J Hosp Pharm 1990 Jun; 47:(6):1354-9

Abstract:

How sales directors of pharmaceutical manufacturing firms and hospital pharmacy directors perceive the role of medical-service representatives (MSRs) in hospitals was studied. Pharmacy directors at U.S. hospitals and sales directors of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association member firms were surveyed by questionnaire in February 1988. Respondents were presented with a list of 13 product-related services and a list of 11 professional and informational services; they were asked to use a five-point scale to indicate how important they believed each service was and how frequently they believed that most MSRs performed the service. A total of 251 (47.0%) usable questionnaires were returned from the hospital pharmacy directors, and 35 (38.5%) were returned from the pharmaceutical sales directors. Hospital pharmacy directors perceived professional and informational services as more important than product-related services. The results suggest that pharmacy directors would like MSRs to place more emphasis on (1) providing drug information to pharmacy before promoting their products to physicians, (2) supporting the role of the clinical pharmacist in promoting appropriate and rational use of a product, and (3) complying with pharmacy and therapeutics committee formulary decisions. Compared with sales directors, pharmacy directors placed less emphasis on information about new dosage forms, assistance in drug recalls, and assistance in obtaining hospital-specific pricing. Differences in perceptions of the role of MSRs exist between hospital pharmacy directors and sales directors of pharmaceutical manufacturing firms.

Keywords:
*analytic survey/United States/sales representatives/attitude toward promotion/quality of information/pharmacies and pharmacists/hospitals/industry perspective/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: HEALTH PROFESSIONALS/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: INDUSTRY/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: PHARMACISTS Attitude of Health Personnel Commerce/statistics & numerical data Drug Industry/statistics & numerical data* Drug Information Services/statistics & numerical data Pharmacy Service, Hospital/statistics & numerical data* Questionnaires United States

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909