Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19384

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

Freemantle N, Johnson R, Dennis J, Kennedy A, Marchment M
Sleeping with the enemy? A randomized controlled trial of a collaborative health authority/industry intervention to influence prescribing practice.
Medicines Evaluation Group 2000; 49:(2):174-9
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2014899/?tool=pubmed

Abstract:

AIMS: To evaluate the effectiveness of a health authority/pharmaceutical company collaborative intervention to influence the choice of proton pump inhibitors

METHODS: Randomized controlled trial, with general practices forming the unit of allocation and analysis.

RESULTS: Constructive working relationships were achieved with five of six pharmaceutical companies involved. One hundred and two out of 140 practitioners in intervention group practices received at least one visit from an industry representative. There were no reports of representatives operating outside their agreed remit. Prescribing in both the intervention and control group moved towards that recommended by the guidelines but there was no difference between the groups in either the proportion of prescriptions in line with the guidelines or the overall cost.

CONCLUSIONS: Health authorities can achieve professional working relationships with the pharmaceutical industry although no changes in practice attributable to the intervention are achieved. Further work is required to develop effective means to influence prescribing in line with independent guidelines especially in the context of the development of Primary Care Groups.

Keywords:
Drug Industry* Drug Prescriptions/economics Drug Prescriptions/standards* Family Practice* Humans Interprofessional Relations Pharmaceutical Preparations/economics Physician's Practice Patterns/standards Physician's Practice Patterns/statistics & numerical data Practice Guidelines as Topic/standards* Program Evaluation

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

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