Article Text
Abstract
Objectives To describe and quantify disclosed payments from the pharmaceutical industry to the healthcare sector, and to examine the impact of the 2015 changes to Australia’s self-regulated system of transparency.
Design Observational database study.
Setting Australia.
Participants Publicly available reports submitted by members of Australian pharmaceutical industry trade organisations, Medicines Australia and the Generic and Biosimilar Medicines Association (GBMA) (October 2011–December 2017).
Exposure Changes to transparency reporting requirements with the updates of pharmaceutical industry Codes of Conduct in 2015.
Main outcome measures Elements of healthcare sector spending that members of industry organisations are required to publicly disclose; cumulative amount of disclosed spending (monthly average) in the year prior to and following the revision.
Results There was a 34.1% reduction in disclosed spending from Medicines Australia member companies in the year after the 2015 changes to the Code of Conduct were introduced ($A89 658 566 in the preceding year, October 2014–September 2015; $A59 052 551 in the following year). The new Code allowed for reduced reporting of spending on food and beverages at events and for sponsored healthcare professionals. However, there was enhanced transparency around identification of individual health professionals receiving payments. GBMA member reporting totalled $A2 580 402 in the year prior to the revision, then ceased.
Conclusions This study shows the limitations of a self-regulatory system around industry disclosure of spending. We advocate for robust regulatory systems, such as legislation, to promote mandatory long-lasting public transparency.
- pharmaceutical industry
- transparency
- industry relationships
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Contributors All authors conceived of the study. LP wrote the first and subsequent drafts. EAK extracted and analysed the data, prepared the tables, and critically revised the manuscript. LB participated in creating the original database and critically revised the manuscript. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Ethics approval Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement Limited data from this study are publicly available. Data on pharmaceutical industry-funded events for Australian health professionals (October 2011–September 2015) are available at https://research-data.sydney.edu.au/index.php/s/npni79P4NhVQ0XB. The pharmaceutical industry payments to healthcare professionals (May 2016–April 2017) database is available at https://research-data.sydney.edu.au/index.php/s/0MmrflPyiQrf53a. Neither of these available databases currently include all educational events for healthcare professionals reports or payments to healthcare professional reports included in this manuscript. The complete health consumer organisation database (January 2013–December 2016) is available at https://researchdata.ands.org.au/pharmaceutical-industry-funding-december-2016/1330638.