Promotional events sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry which target health professionals responsible for prescribing medications, such as physicians and nurse practitioners, are a key component of promotional campaigns for new drugs and devices. While these events are familiar to health professionals, there is little transparency around their scale and impact. A new study by Quinn Grundy, an assistant professor at the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, finds that in the United States, over one million industry sponsored events took place in 2022, a staggering amount in one of the largest pharmaceutical markets in the world.
In the paper published in the JAMA Health Forum, the authors looked at the ten pharmaceutical and medical device products with the most industry-sponsored dinner events and found that there were over 16,000 dinners, sponsored by seven companies. Of these ten products, the analysis found that in two cases, there were more dinner events targeted towards nurse practitioners than physicians, indicating their importance as prescribers in the pharmaceutical market. "Identifying over one million of these events in one year alone and their tendency to be for specific products, should give us pause, and indicate that we need to understand the prevalence of these events from a systems perspective, considering their impact on prescribing practices," says Grundy, who is also the Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre in Governance, Accountability, and Trans.