Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4629
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
Fyfe M.
Gift guide for doctors toughened
The Age (Melbourne) 2006 May 9
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/gift-guide-for-doctors-toughened/2006/05/08/1146940475899.html
Notes:
Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:
“ Ken Harvey, adjunct senior research fellow in the School of Public
Health at La Trobe University, said the guidelines were excellent and
challenged the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners to
follow suit.
But Brendan Kay, vice-chairman of the college’s Victorian faculty, stood
by its 1999 guidelines on gifts, which advise GPs that accepting modest
gifts is fine. “
Why is it fine for the General Practitioners to continue to receive freebies from drug companies when the General Physicians College now finds the practice unethical?
Full text:
Gift guide for doctors toughened
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/gift-guide-for-doctors-toughened/2006/05/08/1146940475899.html
By Melissa Fyfe
May 9, 2006
DOCTORS should not accept gifts from drug companies – even pens and
notepads, according to beefed-up ethical guidelines released yesterday.
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians, which represents 9000
medical specialists in Australian and New Zealand, has moved to clarify
the relationship between doctors and drug companies.
The new guidelines are of an “advisory nature only”, but go further than
the previous two editions. They call on hospitals, research institutes
and universities to establish committees to deal with doctors’ conflicts
of interest with companies.
Doctors falsely believed they were not influenced by drug companies,
said Monash University’s Paul Komesaroff, the college’s ethics convener
and an author of the guidelines.
But he said the evidence was overwhelming: there was no such thing as a
free pen. Even trivial forms of promotion, such as notepads, were
effective in influencing and distorting what drugs a doctor prescribed.
“A lot of evidence shows that gifts and other forms of promotion are
very effective and the more contact they have with industry, the more
likely the doctor is to prescribe the products of that particular
company,” Associate Professor Komesaroff said.
The guidelines include:
■ Entertainment offers should be rejected.
■ Accepting drug samples should be avoided in most cases.
■ Offers to fund travel to conferences should be “considered carefully”
and restricted only to those who will make a formal contribution.
■ Payment for services to industry should be transparent and declared to
employers and patients.
■ Doctors should not accept a fee for the promotion of drugs.
■ Young doctors should be trained about possible conflicts of interest.
“The assumption has been that it is possible to maintain an easy
relationship with the industry,” Professor Komesaroff said. “The risks
associated with uncritical acceptance of gifts and benefits from
industry need to be recognised.”
Doctors’ computer software featuring drug advertisements was “highly
undesirable”, Professor Komesaroff said, and sent the wrong message to
patients. Also of concern was drug company advisory boards. It should be
public knowledge which doctors sat on these boards and what the purpose
was, he said.
Industry funding of drug trials was also fraught. Drug companies are not
supposed to have any control over the data in an experiment, but
Professor Komesaroff said this was not always the case. In global
experiments, researchers sometimes did not see all the raw data.
Ken Harvey, adjunct senior research fellow in the School of Public
Health at La Trobe University, said the guidelines were excellent and
challenged the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners to
follow suit.
But Brendan Kay, vice-chairman of the college’s Victorian faculty, stood
by its 1999 guidelines on gifts, which advise GPs that accepting modest
gifts is fine.
