Healthy Skepticism Library item: 955
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
Meikle J.
NHS links with drug firms under scrutiny
The Guardian 2005 Apr 5
Full text:
Britain’s “lax” controls over powerful drug companies are in danger of undermining public confidence and trust in the NHS, a highly critical report on the links between the pharmaceutical industry, doctors and the government says today.
It blames the Department of Health for failing to put patients and public health first, the industry for helping to promote the belief there is “a pill for every ill” and doctors for succumbing to companies making excessive claims for their drugs and sometimes accepting “considerable sums” for lending their names to particular products.
The all-party Commons select committee on health calls for an independent review of the government’s main regulatory body, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, saying it has been too close to the industry, “a closeness underpinned by common policy objectives, agreed processes, frequent contact, consultation and exchange of staff”.
The MPs say the agency fails to adequately scrutinise data provided by companies seeking licences for their medicines and also does not monitor properly whether drugs have adverse effects on patients.
They also say the Department of Health must no longer be the “sponsor”
department for prompting the drug industry. That responsibility should be shifted to the Department of Trade and Industry.
“The inappropriate or excessive use of medicines can cause distress, ill-health, hospitalisation and even death. Adverse drug reactions are responsible for about 5% of all admissions to hospitals in the UK,” says the report. It is a stinging rebuke to Tony Blair’s desire to use a “lighter touch” with the industry, which employs 83,000 directly, many more indirectly and is the country’s third most profitable economic activity after tourism and finance.
About 650m prescriptions are written each year by GPs in England alone and medicines cost the NHS in England about £7bn a year, about 12% of the annual health budget. Some 80% of that is spent on on patented branded products.
“The Department of Health has for too long optimistically assumed that the interests of health and of the industry are as one,” the report says. “The result is that the industry has been left to its own devices for too long.
It may be relevant that this is the first major select committee inquiry into the pharmaceutical industry for almost 100 years.”
The MPs do recognise that medicines “contribute enormously to the health of the nation” and praise the world-class science that funds two-thirds of all health research and development in Britain. “We need an industry led by the values of the scientists, not those of its marketing force.”
There has been unease concerning the overprescription and safety of antidepressants and potentially fatal side-effects from anti-arthritis drugs. Companies have also been accused of not being fully open with regulators when trials have revealed problems.
As for doctors, the report says it is “extraordinary” that there are stricter controls on specialists in hospitals prescribing drugs than there are on GPs. Doctors, especially those used by companies as key opinion leaders, should be obliged to declare significant sums or gifts they receive from companies as “hospitality”.
David Hinchliffe MP, the chairman of the committee, said that from a public health point of view, regulators needed a stronger rather than lighter touch. It was important the NHS became a service which prevented diseases as well as treated them.
Lord Warner, the health minister, last night insisted that the government had “an effective and proper working relationship with the pharmaceutical industry” and was working with it to ensure that they published full details of clinical trials.
