Ethical issues in the relationships with industry: an ongoing challenge. New Guidelines open for public comment

Interactions between medical practitioners and industry have a profound impact on medical decision-making. It is important to establish clear guidelines to ensure that the values of clinical care, the welfare of society and science prevail over commercial imperatives and monetary values, The Royal Australasian Collage of Physicians has revised its Guidelines for the relationships involving medical practitioners and industry to provide practical assistance to health care professionals in the understanding and management of their interactions with industry. The Guidelines are advisory but provide argument and references to support their conclusions. They outline a practical approach to the management of dualities and conflicts of interests. Among other things, they recommend that gifts should be rejected, including those of small value and entertainment expenses. They argue that industry sponsorship to attend meetings should be restricted to cases where formal contributions are being made, that drug samples should not be accepted from pharmaceutical representatives and that endorsements of specific products and "advertorials" should be avoided. They propose that clinicians should not actively recruit their own patients into studies in which they are investigators and that it should be a condition of agreement to participate by researchers and approval by ethics committees that there is a commitment to make publicly available all results potentially relevant to clinical practice. The Guidelines are intended to reflect changing community attitudes and will continue to be revised from time to time.