GMC should hold conflicts of interest register for all doctors, says McCartney
BMJ 2018; 363 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k4230 (Published 08 October 2018) Cite this as: BMJ 2018;363:k4230
All UK doctors should be required to submit their declarations of interest to a public register held by the General Medical Council, the GP and former columnist for The BMJ Margaret McCartney has argued.
In a session focusing on doctors’ links to industry at the Royal College of General Practitioners conference in Glasgow on 5 October, McCartney said that while the medical regulator encouraged doctors to be transparent, it hadn’t yet given them the tools to do this properly.
McCartney said she had stressed the need for the GMC to hold such a register in her response to its 2016 consultation about a proposed update to the medical register. The GMC acknowledged the view in its response1 but it has no plans to change its policy.
McCartney said that the current system—where each practice, organisation, or clinical commissioning group holds its own register of interests—was inconsistent and often impossible for patients to find and make sense of.
“You could potentially have four or five different jobs as a GP with four or five different registers. Patients will not know where to look.
“We need a central register which is updated annually and can be updated over the year. It means that it’s searchable and transparent, and it means that any patient, commissioner, or organisation can access it know that that is where the data is.”
McCartney also raised the matter of how British doctors are viewed from abroad, noting that when the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry published its voluntary declarations of interest from British doctors on the Disclosure UK website, a newspaper in the US ran the headline “British doctors lack transparency where big pharma pays.”2
She said: “The rest of the world is looking at us and it doesn’t look good. If I was a patient taking advice from my doctor and I didn’t know whether he or she had a conflict of interest, I would be concerned.”
“We have to show that we are deserving of trust. We have to take the lead and say we want to get this better. Now has to be the time to sort it out.”