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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19212

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: Electronic Source

Hobson K
Nurse Practitioners Get Free Meals From Pharma, Too
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2011 Feb 17
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2011/02/17/nurse-practitioners-get-free-meals-from-pharma-too/


Full text:

How’s this for a mash-up of much-debated Health Blog topics: “Advanced practice nurses are performing tasks once reserved for physicians” plus “Is it ethically acceptable for a doctor to take a free restaurant meal from a pharma company?”

Those contentious strands come together in a paper published in December in the American Journal of Managed Care that looks at how nurse practitioners interact with and view the pharma industry. They, like doctors, have prescribing power, though it’s limited in some states.

“Nurse practitioners have been “operating ‘under the radar’ regarding research and policy on the influences of pharmaceutical marketing,” write researchers from Boston’s MGH Institute of Health Professions and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. According to their survey, NPs interact plenty with pharma companies, and don’t seem troubled by the relationship. Whether you feel the same depends on your view of pharma industry freebies: a subtle influencer of behavior or too inconsequential to sway prescribing decisions?

The researchers surveyed 263 members of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (9% of their initial randomly selected sample of 3,000 members ended up participating) on their prescribing practices and interactions with industry, perceived reliability of information from the pharma industry and ethics of accepting gifts and meals.

A full 96% said they have regular contact with pharma-industry reps, and 83% said the information they received was reliable. Almost everyone (96%) said they’d attended CME courses sponsored by industry, with 91% saying the information they received there was at least somewhat reliable.

Most (66%) reported giving out drug samples, said they were at least somewhat helpful in learning about new meds (73%) and acknowledged that samples encourage the prescription of new branded (and heavily marketed) drugs (62%).

As for the free meals, 49% reported attending lunch events in the past 6 months, and 64% said the same about dinner events. And 48% said they were then more likely to prescribe one of the drugs featured at these events. Almost all (90%) said it was acceptable to attend these sponsored meals and 75% said it was fine for a speaker appearing there to be paid by a pharma company. Most (61%) said it was fine for practices to accept small gifties and free meals from pharma companies.

NPs were asked if the free gifts distributed by sales reps had any effect on their likelihood of prescribing a certain drug; 93% said no.

Even though “the scope and extent of their prescribing activities have been less than obvious to consumers and to other health-care professionals, the pharmaceutical industry has clearly taken notice,” the authors write.

We’ve previously written about a similar survey of doctors that found 83% of all respondents had accepted food in the workplace while 78% accepted free drug samples.

 

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