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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16504

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: Magazine

East M
No such thing as a free lunch for GPs
Australian Doctor 2009 Sep 8
http://www.australiandoctor.com.au/articles/25/0C063C25.asp?


Full text:

Doctors may have to improve their sandwich-making skills or risk going hungry at future pharmaceutical industry-sponsored events.

As part of a push for greater transparency be-tween health professionals and the pharmaceutical industry, doctors have been urged to refrain from accepting free meals and gifts at industry-sponsored meetings.

Professor Philip Mitchell, head of the school of psychiatry at the University of NSW, believes doctors have no alternative but to “drastically” improve the transparency of their interactions with pharmaceutical companies.

His comments in the Medical Journal of Australia (7 September) follow allegations in the US that health professionals failed to adequately disclose earnings from drug companies and conflicts of interest.

“We now have a major credibility problem with the public in Australia and around the world,” Professor Mitchell told Australian Doctor.

“I think it’s very important that doctors seriously consider what they accept from the [pharmaceutical] industry, including meals, because they can be perceived as gifts.

“If we do not regulate ourselves … governments or the courts will, and the outcomes of that may not be palatable to doctors.”

Professor Mitchell said it was inevitable that doctors would eventually need to declare any earnings from pharmaceutical companies and potential conflicts of interest.

Medicines Australia already publishes details of industry-sponsored educational and marketing activities, but Professor Mitchell believes the names of doctors receiving remuneration should be made public.

“If you look at what is happening in the US — and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t happen here — is that pharmaceutical companies are putting the specific amounts they paid to specific clinicians on their websites,” he said.

“How we publish it in Australia has to be discussed, but it has to happen.”

 

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