There is less than 2 weeks to go till the 2024 Summer Meeting of the British Association for Psychopharmacology [BAP]. This year it is being held in Birmingham.
As ever, the conference will provide multiple opportunities for psychiatrists to be educated by paid opinion leaders. If you click here you can look at these opportunities over a 10 year period of BAP Summer Meetings.
I worked as an NHS psychiatrist for 25 years. Concerned about the involvement of industry I never once attended BAP meetings or used their educational material. However, most of my colleagues routinely did.
Not long before I retired, an NHS psychiatrist colleague said to me: “I’m attending the BAP masterclass course (3 days) later this month and I was really excited about it. I thought they would give me the answers to some tricky medication issues. I’ll be honest, I never thought to really check their links to pharma or what they have declared regarding accepting industry money.”
There is longstanding evidence that exposure to industry promotional activity can lead to doctors recommending worse treatments for patients. Furthermore, most evidence is based on short-term studies so cannot say anything about future outcomes, as the Cumberlege Review: First Do No Harm has established.
The following posts outline the way that marketing, conflated with education, has continued to influence the prescribing behaviour of UK psychiatrists. A number of senior UK psychiatrists, including past presidents of the Royal College of Psychiatrists have offered reassurance that the influence of marketing is “not excessive” and have even stated that this is “a problem of yesteryear“. Please look at the following posts and look for yourself at evidence that calls into question such casual reassurances:
[please note, each title and each image will lead to a separate post]
A COMMITTEE led by Paid Opinion Leaders:
The BMJ: Tackling the excesses of pharmaceutical marketing and promotion:
Panel stacking is a threat to consensus statement validity:
“A robust learning environment for healthcare professionals”:
The BMJ: Medical education: In the grip of Industry?:
