Drug promotion, advertising and ethical relationships with industry
When pharmaceutical companies give doctors incentives to learn about their drugs, how much does it influence the doctors’ decision making? Those incentives could come in the form of a free trip to London to speak at a conference or a few sandwiches for GP’s to enjoy at lunchtime.
Some experts have been concerned for years about how pharmaceutical marketing is affecting the quality of medicine we, as patients, receive.
Dr Ken Harvey gave a lecture on this topic to Monash pharmacology students on August 21, 2015. A PDF version is available here.. It was followed on August 28 by an interview with Michael McKenzie on Australia’s Radio National about the same topic. That interview can be heard at the following link:
http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programitem/pgYOG2yM17
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“Asset exchange”—interactions between patient groups and pharmaceutical industry: Australian qualitative study 2019
Lisa Parker,1 Alice Fabbri,1 Quinn Grundy,2 Barbara Mintzes,1 Lisa Bero1
BMJ 2019;367:l6694
An understanding of the range of views patient groups have about pharmaceutical company sponsorship will be useful for groups that seek to identify and manage any ethical concerns about these relationships. Patient groups that receive pharmaceutical industry money should anticipate they might be asked for specific assets in return. Selective industry funding of groups where active product marketing opportunities exist might skew the patient group sector’s activity towards pharmaceutical industry interests and allow industry to exert proxy influence over advocacy and subsequent health policy.
You can read the whole article here.
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Risky business? Pharmaceutical industry sponsorship of health consumer groups (2021)
Lisa A Bero, Lisa Parker
Australian Prescriber Volume 33 Number 3 June 2021
Pharmaceutical industry sponsorship of health consumer groups is common. Since 2013, Medicines Australia has publicly reported the amount of money that member pharmaceutical companies provide to consumer organisations. From 2013 to 2016, companies provided a total of $34,507,810 to 230 Australian health consumer organisations. However, nearly half of these organisations made no mention of industry sponsorship on their websites and fewer than one in five had policies governing sponsorship. ………….We strongly support the global move towards greater transparency around industry funding in the health sector,21 including for health consumer organisations. If health consumer organisations made clear disclosures about the extent, amount and uses of pharmaceutical industry sponsorship, this would allow patients and referring health professionals to be much better informed about the impacts of industry influence. Read the whole article here.