London: Drug companies are paying an estimated £40m a year to British doctors in service fees, flights, hotel and other travel expenses, according to the trade body that represents pharmaceutical companies.
The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) said that most of the 44 biggest companies had now revealed how much they paid doctors to help market their drugs. Its aggregated total of 40m is based on 35 suppliers who have shared precise information with the body and estimates for the rest.
The largest British group, GlaxoSmithKline, spent £1.9m on fees for advice and consultancy on 1,517 UK-based doctors, an average of 1,252 each. It also sponsored 1,022 doctors and other healthcare professionals to attend scientific conferences and meetings, at a total cost of £887,294 an average of 868 per trip.
Doctors have always denied that taking drug company money influences their judgement in any way about a medicine, but suspicions have lingered.
Doctors sometimes ask for sponsorship to go to international meetings, which they argue they need to attend to keep up with developments in their field. Their hospitals cannot afford to pay their flights and hotel bills, they say.
Thousands of doctors have their flights, registration fees and hotels paid for when they attend major international conferences on cancer or cardiology. They are transported to top restaurants by their sponsoring company and socialise with its staff. Many of the speakers who take to the platform to talk about the benefits of new medicines are senior doctors who are earning a consultancy fee from a pharmaceutical firm.
AstraZeneca, the other major British company, separates out the payments from its UK office and those from its “global teams and international affiliates”. The UK office paid £671,400 in fees to 903 doctors plus £30,200 for their travel and hotel bills. Some doctors carried out more than one engagement. Their average earnings including expenses came to £776.96.
But those who were paid by the global teams did far better. A total of £563,000 including expenses was paid out to 93 individuals, giving an average of £6,053.76. However, the 93 people were involved in 304 activities, which gave them an average fee, including expenses, of £1,851.97.
Unlike AstraZeneca, GSK said it had added in payments from its offices abroad, because many of the doctors who receive payment for advice and consultation are global experts.
AstraZeneca, however, did not sponsor any doctors to go to conferences in 2012, a major departure for a pharmaceutical company, because the bad publicity surrounding drug company junkets made it rethink its policy.
In 2005, the Commons health select committee warned in a report that the industry’s sponsorship of doctors and other medical staff had drug promotion as its motive and could lead to the unsafe prescribing of drugs such as Vioxx, the arthritis drug which was found to cause heart attacks.
