Big Pharma footing the bill
HEALTH: College criticized for delaying report on industry influence
The agency that certifies Canada’s family doctors says it will keep taking drug-industry money to pay for its education programs despite commissioning a report on Big Pharma’s influence, which it then kept under wraps for two years.
One critic called the response from the College of Family Physicians of Canada after putting time and energy into the issue “embarrassing,” while the college itself says lack of taxpayer aid leaves it with few options.
“This is a funding vacuum that the pharmaceutical industry has filled for most family physicians’ practice lifetimes,” college leaders write on the website healthydebate.ca.
“In the absence of public funding, the private sector filled the void.”
The newly divulged report — completed in 2013 — makes modest recommendations to curb industry’s impact. They include making conflicts of interest more transparent, setting up a new, independent fund for continuing education that won’t be linked to specific sponsors and letting doctors get their meals at college conferences without running the gauntlet of industry marketing booths.
But the college is stopping well short of turning off the flow of pharmaceutical money — and still refuses to divulge an analysis of exactly how much corporate funding its educational programs receive.
College leaders were not available for comment Monday.
The report on industry influence was submitted to the group’s board in November 2013, but was released publicly late last month only after a challenge from three doctors on the Healthy Debate site.
Some of what is recommended is valuable, but the organization could have been much tougher, argues Dr. Joel Lexchin, who co-authored the editorial taking the college to task.
He cited a family medicine group in Oregon that has eschewed industry funding entirely and an emergency medicine journal in Australia that declines all drug-company ads.
“This report took over two years to become public,” added Lexchin, a Toronto emergency doctor and health policy professor at York University. “That doesn’t strike me as a demonstration of a leadership that is willing to get out in front of this.”
The college plays a key role in Canadian medicine, accrediting the medical schools that train family doctors, certifying the generalist physicians themselves and overseeing continuing medical education for 35,000 working family doctors.