Yesterday’s Sunday Business Post

In yesterday’s Sunday Business Post…

Susan Mitchell and Jack Horgan-Jones reported:

A Sunday Business Post investigation today reveals that drug companies are funding dozens of medical and nursing posts in some of the biggest hospitals in the country, while almost one-third of the HSE’s most senior doctors are receiving money from pharmaceutical firms.

The investigation also found that hospitals are unable to account for millions of euro that pharmaceutical companies say they paid them.

Hospitals said they had no visibility of many of these payments, which were sometimes made to individual departments and organisations controlled by groups of doctors.

More than €17 million was paid out last year. That figure excludes funding for research and development or clinical trials. Among the items paid for by big drugs companies in Irish hospitals are a couch, a DVD player and a coffee machine.

The industry is also paying hundreds of thousands to individual medical colleges to fund the continuing medical education of doctors.

Professor Michael Barry, who heads up the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics (NCPE), told this newspaper that he believes payments from industry are influencing prescribing habits in Ireland.

He said doctors were prescribing more costly branded medicines here than doctors in other countries. He also said the industry should not be funding the medical education of doctors.

How doctors and hospitals cash in on big pharma (Sunday Business Post)

Previously: Medical Trials And Children Of Lesser Gods