Should all doctors publicly declare payments from drug firms?
BMJ 2016; 355 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/sbmj.i4308 (Published 04 October 2016) Cite this as: BMJ 2016;355:i4308
- Marika Davies, medicolegal adviser, Medical Protection
You may have enjoyed a free lunch from a drug company while you were a medical student, but would you continue to accept gifts once you’ve qualified?
A publicly available website called Disclosure UK1 has been launched by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, which lists the payments made to UK doctors from the drug industry. We now know that in 2015 drug companies paid out over £340m (€400m; $440m) to doctors and other healthcare professionals.
Two thirds of this was spent on clinical studies and trials, with the remainder accounted for by “events” (including travel, accommodation, and registration fees) and “services and consultancy”—for example, training and chairing or speaking at meetings.
How much does the database really tell us?
Criticism of the scheme has been made because participation by health professionals is entirely voluntary. The drug firms making the payments are listed in the database, but the individuals receiving the payments are named only if they give their consent. As 30% of healthcare professionals who did not agree to have their data disclosed were in receipt of 52% of the payments registered, it is not surprising that the exercise has been described by Margaret McCartney, a general practitioner and columnist for The BMJ, as having “all the thrust of a dead jellyfish.”2
Another criticism is that the database covers only drug company payments, which Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of the BMJ, says “represent only part of the overall picture of financial competing interests in healthcare.”3 She considers the database to be “a useful step towards greater transparency and public accountability, but it serves mainly to show just how far we …
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