Focus: Costly ‘Gifts’ To Doctors Push Up Medicine Prices

The obnoxious practice of drug companies giving costly gifts such as gold chains, cars and foreign junkets to doctors may come to an end if the government accepts recommendations made by the parliamentary standing committee on health.

Such gifts make doctors prescribe drugs of companies dishing out freebies and also contribute to higher marketing costs, which in turn, add to the consumer price of such drugs, the committee observed in its latest report. 

The practice needs to be banned by enforcing legal - not voluntary - code of conduct for doctors and drug makers.
The department of pharmaceuticals has in place a code of conduct for drug companies to restrict such unethical practices, but it is voluntary in nature.

The parliamentary panel has recommended that this code by made mandatory. The Medical Council of India (MCI) too had formulated rules for doctors to oversee marketing of drugs in 2009.

But despite such codes, 'there is no let up this evil practice and pharma companies continue to sponsor foreign trips of many doctors and shower them with high value gifts like air conditioners, cars, music systems, gold chains etc to obliging prescribers who then prescribe costlier drugs as quid pro quo', the report says. 

While there is a code of conduct forbidding doctors from accepting gifts, hospitality and foreign trips, the committee said, there is no legal provision for penalising drug companies indulging in unethical practice of 'bribing doctors by expensive gifts, cash payments or sponsorship of pleasure trips'. 

'It is no secret that promotional costs are loaded into the price of prescription drugs and constitute a major part of the price of drugs', the panel concluded. 

The voluntary nature of Uniform Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices of the department of pharmaceuticals has failed to curb unethical practices and illegal promotion of drugs. 

The committee has also recommended that the health ministry should be involved in enforcing the code, along with the department of pharmaceuticals.

Meanwhile, the health ministry has set up a three member panel to examine illegal clinical trials approved by the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI). Gross violations in drug approvals was exposed by the parliamentary panel. 

The committee will examine the validity of the scientific and statutory basis adopted for approval of new drugs, outline appropriate measures to bring about improvements in the processing and grant of statutory approvals. 

It will also suggest steps to institutionalise improvements in the functioning of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization. 

The panel, comprising director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research V.M. Katoch, president of the National Brain Research Centre Dr P.N. Tandon and former director of the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, Dr S.S. Aggarwal, has been asked to submit its report within two months.