The public has a right to know what gifts doctors get from drug companies
: It doesn’t take a medical degree to understand there is no such thing as a free lunch.
But lots of people with medical degrees will argue the free lunch they get from a drug company has no bearing on what drugs they will prescribe.
That is despite international research showing doctors who accept money, gifts or sponsored training from pharmaceutical companies make worse prescribing decisions and are more likely to dole out the sponsor’s drug.
Pharmaceutical company payments to health workers are under the spotlight around the world.
In response to concerns over such conflicts of interest, in 2015 Medicines New Zealand, which is the industry association of prescription drug makers, said it was working on a system of disclosing such freebies and expected to have it in place in 2016.
Two years later, the only visible progress on such a disclosure scheme is that Medicines New Zealand has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the New Zealand Medical Association, which represents doctors, to devise a viable system.
Gifts from drug companies can range from branded marketing items, like pens, to free international trips, such as the $8000 Pfizer-sponsored trip to Barcelona for a Wellington specialist nurse to attend a global haemophilia summit. At that summit, there was one staff member from drug maker Pfizer for every four health workers.
Disclosure matters because the public deserves to know if a doctor prescribing a drug has any motivation other than the well-being of the patient, and because disclosure would limit the worst excesses of the cozy relationship between drug companies and doctors.
Doctors argue they are responsible for their continuing education and drug company reps can be good sources of drug information, such as clinical trial information. That is a valid argument but patients should know if such information came with a free overseas trip or a free lunch.
Health workers in Australia, the United States and Britain all now disclose drug company gifts and payments.
In the United States, you can enter your doctor’s name into a database and find out how much he or she has received, and from whom. Under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, such disclosure is mandatory.
Public health workers in New Zealand are supposed to log any such freebies in their health board’s gift register. But Stuff investigations have shown that system to be patchy and far from transparent.
Medical Association chairwoman Kate Baddock told Stuff a disclosure system would need to be acceptable and appropriate to both parties, and not too onerous to administer.
Doctors are busy and accounting for gifts should not be a time-consuming task but the key beneficiaries of such a system are neither the drug industry, whose gifts are a form of marketing to doctors, nor doctors, who benefit from the freebies.
The disclosure system is to protect patients, whose health is affected by the prescription decisions made by doctors, and taxpayers, who fund the health system.
If the two industries who benefit from medical freebies can not devise a way to disclose those transactions, then perhaps a public watchdog agency should step in.
Alastair Paulin is a news director for Stuff in Christchurch. This opinion piece appeared as an editorial in The Press on January 5.
– The Press
