Consumers Health Forum has criticised the current draft of the code of practice that regulates pharmaceutical marketing.
Medicines Australia has sent the 17th Edition of its Code of Conduct to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for authorisation. While there are some improvements, CHF and other stakeholders have concerns that the new Code doesn’t provide sufficient transparency to ensure consumer confidence in pharmaceutical industry relationships with health professionals.
Edition 17 of the Code requires Medicines Australia member companies to provide reports of aggregate amounts of all payments made to healthcare professionals. This includes sponsorship of healthcare professionals for advisory boards, consultancy arrangements, attendance and speaking at medical conferences and educational events. Member companies arenot required to provide the names of individuals who have received payments or sponsorship, or the amount of funding provided to each individual.
CHF CEO Carol Bennett said that naming of individual practitioners is necessary if the aims of the Code are to be achieved.
In an article published in The Australian, Ms Bennett said: “Consumers want to know that a practitioner is making a decision in their best healthcare interests, and that there is not some other purpose behind it.”
“It is important the practitioner, amount and source is identified. Until we get to that level of detail it is not that valuable to consumers, because it doesn’t allow them to make an informed decision.”
Work is underway to introduce this kind of disclosure in the United States. Greens Senator Richard di Natale plans to introduce legislation in Australia that would ban payments for doctors to attend seminars in Australia and overseas, limit the amount drug companies could spend on hospitality, and require pharmaceutical companies to report any advisory board or other fees paid to individual doctors, who would be named.
CHF has made a submission to the ACCC on the Code, and has urged them to require individual level reporting of payments and sponsorships to health professionals as a condition of authorisation of the Code.
See also Choice’s similar concerns in Call for full disclosure of drug company payments to doctors