TORONTO — Weak conflict-of-interest guidelines at Canada’s 17 medical schools could leave students vulnerable to biased lectures and training sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry, a new report is warning.
Industry-sponsored events, biased information, and drug company speaking events are just a handful of red flags, a York University study says. Ultimately, this influence could be swaying the minds of future doctors and health care professionals, it alleges.
“We evaluated the conflict of interest policies of all the 17 medical schools in Canada and found that only one had relatively stringent policies and in 12 others, these policies were weak or nonexistent,” Adrienne Shnier, the study’s co-author, said.
It’s the first in Canada to take a comprehensive look at conflict-of-interest guidelines across Canada’s medical schools. The study was published Thursday evening in the journal PLoS One.
“Unrestrictive policies and poorly regulated areas such as drug samples, frequent visits by sales representatives, and speaking engagements by drug company representatives are the biggest concerns,” the authors say in a press release accompanying the study.
It advised teachers and students to be wary of industry ties.
Among the worst offenders according to the study were the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) in Sudbury, Ont., followed by the University of Alberta. On the other end of the spectrum, Western University fared the best.
In its defense, the University of Alberta said the study was based on university-wide policy in place in September 2011. Right now, the university has been developing a faculty-specific policy on interaction with industry, a spokesperson said in a statement.
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The policy is in a draft form and is being looked at by faculty members.
“The faculty is committed to its students’ development as truly independent and autonomous physicians who place their patients’ need above all other interests,” Dr. Douglas Miller, the university’s dean in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, said.
For its part, NOSM told Global News the study is “completely flawed and quite erroneous.”
“The reason we don’t have a policy is because we’re new and the policy is under development,” the school said in a statement to Global News.
Third-worst in the rankings was Queen’s University. Leslie Flynn, interim dean of education at the Faculty of Health Sciences, said she was “surprised and disappointed” by the findings.
“Our thinking is that the methodology they deployed didn’t capture the depth of our policies,” she said.
“It’s a very serious subject for us, both the faculty and university’s health sciences. We follow numerous policies regarding conflict-of-interest, academic integrity and research integrity,” she said.
She suggested this information, which is posted online, was overlooked.
The study follows on the heels of another report, published last month in the Journal of Medical Ethics. In this case, the paper suggested that University of Toronto students weren’t properly informed of Big Pharma influence in a week-long lecture series on pain.
About 1,400 former medical students were contacted by the school and told to disregard the teaching materials they were given.
Read more: Patient safety may have been put at risk by U of T pain lectures: doctor
The university placed seventh in the rankings.
Read the York University full study here.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
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