E-drug: Appropriate Marketing of Pharmaceutics (cont'd)
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Deran Bagdadi asks about appropriate marketing of pharmaceuticals
and requests to participate in discussions. Often correspondents mail
notes directly back to the person who asked the question, thus
depriving us of some interesting debate.
I have one example that illustrates a trend in the UK. A development
project in this country (funded via a charitable organisation through
money from the Dept of Health) aims to change prescribing in
congestive cardiac failure by increasing appropriate use of ACE
Inhibitors and an open-access echochardiography service.
The project manager signs a written contract with a company (one of
several from which they get additional resources and funding) for the
loan of a mobile echo service. The agreement states that the company
will not link prescribing of its own ACE inhibitor to the provision of
the service.
Reports start to come in of GPs being persuaded by reps to alter their
prescribing to the company's product because the 'company sponsored
congestive cardiac failure project' has this as one of its provisos. The
project manager complains and the marketing director apologises for
'maverick sales people'. The project manager complains to the
Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and (despite
company appeals) the complaint is upheld. Apparently reps had been,
to some degree, pursuing the central company line. But there are no
sanctions.
Many of you may have similar experiences, I am sure. The question is,
as State funding for this sort of project, development and
implementation work shrinks, what can local health authorities and
providers do about it?
Best wishes
David Gilbert
e-mail: cndgilb@kehf.org.uk
[Note from the moderator: David makes a good point: discussions on E-
drug often stop because correspondents go into direct e-mail
conversation with the person who submitted a question and little is
heard anymore about it. Conversely, E-drug moderators often find
themselves postmasters, forwarding answers that are not that
interesting to the large E-drug family ("Please contact XXX in my
department; she did research on the topic a couple of years ago"), but
which were submitted to e-drug. Direct e-mail conversation would be
preferable here.
Direct conversation does not need to be a problem, provided the
person who submitted the question regularly feeds back the results to
the large E-drug conference. This is also strongly encouraged in the
E-drug information document. May I ask again attention for this
important point? Hilbrand Haak]
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