HAI Europe has published a guide https://haiweb.org/pharmaceutical-marketing-online/ (November 2019) to assist health professionals to identify promotional activities and to understand their impact to medical practice and to enable critical appraisal of promotional material. Without such skills, practitioners may be left to interpret misinformation as fact and to prescribe or dispense specific medicines where other treatment options should be considered.
This guide and associated workshops have been developed to address this oversight by providing an overview of pharmaceutical marketing practices and the ethical issues that arise from them.
Learning Objectives
- To identify and assess the methods used in pharmaceutical promotion activities.
- To understand the impact of pharmaceutical promotion techniques on clinical practice and public health.
- To learn about the European Union (EU) regulatory framework on pharmaceutical promotion and the problem of self-regulation.
- To enable critical appraisal of pharmaceutical promotion activities in a way that safeguards evidence-based medicine.
This guide and its workshop series build on the publication, Understanding and Responding to Pharmaceutical Promotion: A Practical Guide, produced by Health Action International, in collaboration with the World Health Organization, in 2009.
The examples used in this publication are not exhaustive, but are included to provide insight into the pharmaceutical industry’s strategies and resources as case studies.
Also see pdf here