Health bosses secretly accepted gifts worth £3.7m from drug firms

NHS managers have received secret gifts and payments worth £3.7million from private health companies in two years, investigators say.

Clinical commissioning groups, which allocate NHS funds in local areas, must declare any funding or donations, such as free tickets for sports or pop events.

But only a quarter of funds were declared in public registers between April 2015 and March 2017, research by the British Medical Journal revealed.

Freedom of Information requests to English CCGs found that £5.03million was received in cash or gifts. But the groups only declared £1.29million, leaving £3.74million undeclared, BMJ investigators found.

The news could lead to accusations that firms are trying to influence CCGs to use certain drugs, medical devices or services.

The investigators, who worked with researchers at the University of Bath and Lund University in Sweden, found that donations from companies included tickets to sports matches and pop concerts.

They also discovered that a large number of payments and gifts went to just a handful of organisations, with nine of England’s 207 CCGs accounting for half the number of donations received. Nearly three quarters of the funding from drug firms was for sponsorship of education and training events.

For example, NHS Warwickshire North CCG received 89 payments with a total value of £24,150 to sponsor educational events, but these are not listed in its online register.

Drugs firms funded many ‘projects’ – but the groups do not say what they involved.

NHS Southwark CCG, for example, received £24,000 in funding from Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Pfizer for a project. But no details were published in its register.

Other CCGs refused to accept the payments. NHS Hastings and Rother CCG told the BMJ this helped it ‘avoid

‘Avoid bias in decision-making’

situations of undue bias or influence in decision-making’.

University of Bath lecturer Piotr Ozieranski, who worked on the research, said: ‘It seems rather peculiar that CCGs are permitted to accept any payments or benefits in kind from private-sector companies.’

NHS Southwark CCG said: ‘Details of payments for educational grants are available to anyone who wishes to submit a request for information.’

NHS Warwickshire North CCG said: ‘Our gifts and hospitality and commercial sponsorship registers are reported to the CCG’s audit committee, and registers are published.’

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry said drug firms had an important role in supporting healthcare organisations.