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Photo of Shai Mulinari. Private photo.

Shai Mulinari

Associate Professor | Senior Lecturer

Photo of Shai Mulinari. Private photo.

Drug company payments to General Practices in England: cross-sectional and social network analysis

Author

  • Eszter Saghy
  • Shai Mulinari
  • Piotr Ozieranski

Summary, in English

Although there has been extensive research on pharmaceutical industry payments to healthcare professionals, healthcare organisations with key roles in health systems have received little attention. We seek to contribute to addressing this gap in research by examining drug company payments to General Practices in England in 2015. We combine a publicly available payments database managed by the pharmaceutical industry with datasets covering key practice characteristics. We find that practices were an important target of company payments, receiving £2,726,018, equivalent to 6.5% of the value of payments to all healthcare organisations in England. Payments to practices were highly concentrated and specific companies were also highly dominant. The top 10 donors and the top 10 recipients amassed 87.9% and 13.6% of the value of payments, respectively. Practices with more patients, a greater proportion of elderly patients, and those in more affluent areas received significantly more payments on average. However, the patterns of payments were similar across England’s regions. We also found that company networks–established by making payments to the same practices–were largely dominated by a single company, which was also by far the biggest donor. Greater policy attention is required to the risk of financial dependency and conflicts of interests that might arise from payments to practices and to organisational conflicts of interests more broadly. Our research also demonstrates that the comprehensiveness and quality of payment data disclosed via industry self-regulatory arrangements needs improvement. More interconnectivity between payment data and other datasets is needed to capture company marketing strategies systematically.

Department/s

  • Sociology

Publishing year

2021-12-07

Language

English

Publication/Series

PLoS ONE

Volume

16

Issue

12

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Topic

  • Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)

Status

Published

Project

  • Following the money: cross-national study of pharmaceutical industry payments to medical associations and patient organisations
  • What can be learnt from the new pharmaceutical industry payment disclosures? A network and policy analysis of ties between companies and health professionals and organisations

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1932-6203