Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1040
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: news
Fidelman C.
Drug company pitches in Private-Public partnership. Will spend $3 million in government-run diabetes-prevention program
The Gazette 2003 Apr 8
Full text:
A private drug company’s funding of a provincial government-run diabetes-prevention program has doctors’ and patients’ approval. “Finally, good partnership between the private and public sector – because the government doesn’t have the money,” Yves Lamontagne, president of the Collège des Médecins du Québec, said yesterday.
Lamontagne’s comments came after multinational pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline announced it will invest $3 million over the next three years in a pilot project to combat diabetes.
Physicians are calling the program a good example of the type of public-private partnership proposed three years ago by the Clair Commission. “And not only doctors, but also nurses and nutritionists support the project for one simple reason: This company is putting money for direct relations with patients,” Lamontagne said of the project, called PRIISME (Programmes régionaux intégrés d’informations de suivi médical et d’enseignement).
Inaugurated in Rimouski two months ago and slated for Laval next, followed by Montreal, the diabetes-prevention program is to feature a multidisciplinary, team approach that focuses on the patient.
“It’s one thing to take pills, but with diabetes you have to take care of how you eat and exercise,” Lamontagne said. “It’s more of an information and education campaign for patients, with the help of nurses and dietitians and general physicians to better treat a chronic disease.”
The $3 million funding is in addition to the $6 million invested in a similar program implemented four years ago with regional health boards and CLSCs to treat chronic respiratory illnesses such as asthma, said GlaxoSmithKline spokesperson Marie-Christine Beauchemin.
About 30,000 patients went through the respiratory program, Beauchemin said, resulting in a 30-per-cent reduction in the number of visits to emergency rooms.
About 500,000 Quebecers suffer from diabetes, and the numbers are expected to swell to 750,000 by the end of the decade.
“The goal is to empower the patients so they know the symptoms and know how to react, and can live a normal, quality life,” Beauchemin said.
The program does not promote GlaxoSmithKline’s drugs, Beauchemin noted: “It’s not our medicine that’s being (promoted). A doctor can arrive with his own.”
Serge Langlois, head of the patients’ group Quebec Diabetes Association, said the pilot project is providing what’s needed most. “We need more education for people affected by diabetes. Nine of 10 don’t get it. It’s a huge problem.”
