Big Pharma funds medical establishment

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Royal colleges in the UK

Have received more than £9m in marketing payments from drug and medical devices companies since 2015

The Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of General Practitioners, biggest recipients of industry money

BMJ 2023;382p1658

Published: 26 July 2023

Medical royal colleges do not always disclose publicly the millions of pounds they receive from drug and medical device companies.

The BMJ asked the colleges to disclose all payments from industry …. but they all refused to do so.

The colleges are not obliged to disclose these payments;

they are not included in their annual reports,

and are only available through voluntary industry transparency initiatives,

which experts say have severe limitations.

Drug companies

Gave £7.5m to royal colleges in the years 2015 to 2022, (for which data were available)

Royal College of Physicians, £ 2.8 million

Royal College of GPs, £2.4 million

The biggest donor overall was Pfizer

£1.8m of payments

Novo Nordisk with £730 000

Daiichi Sankyo with £478 000

Since 2012 the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland

Has refused to take any sponsorship from drug companies, noting,

research “overwhelmingly” shows that clinicians are influenced by industry marketing,

and that this affects prescribing.

Emma Hardy, All Party Parliamentary Group on Surgical Mesh Implants.

“Medicine is literally a matter of life and death, and patients must be confident they are receiving the best treatment available for the right reasons.”

Up to 170,000 people who have had hernia mesh implants in England in the past six years could face complications,

Margaret McCartney, GP, former Royal College of General Practitioners trustee and council member

“Even if we are told the information is independent,

funding skews the types of education or information that gets made,”

“It means that we become less independent, because we are not setting our own priorities,

and that’s bad for the profession.”

Conflict of interest scandals

In March 2023 the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry temporarily suspended the drug company Novo Nordisk,

because of “serious breaches” of the association’s code of practice.

(The ABPI only saves the data on payments for the most recent three years and deletes historical data)

Data compiled from Disclosure UK

An online database run by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI),

(where drug companies disclose payments to healthcare organisations, patient groups, and health professionals,

who have consented for these payments to be made public)

Piotr Ozieranski, (Bath University), and Shai Mulinari, (Lund University)

Payments were reported under wide categories,

were changed without explanation,

or were inconsistent between data sources.

It is impossible to tell how much money goes to each recipient,

“without many hours of forensic work,”