Confessions of a GP

Drug reps… again

More of a moan about drug reps and the pharmaceutical industry’s cosy relationship with some doctors. I need to point out that most GPs have a healthy mistrust of the drug companies. An average GP might see a pharmaceutical rep once a week or so to find out about the new drugs on the market, but they take the presented information with a pinch of salt and are able to make their own minds up about the best drug to prescribe for their patients and the country’s health budget.

As I said earlier, most GPs now don’t get much more of an incentive to prescribe a specific drug than the odd free pen or egg sandwich. However, one or two GPs are still very much in the tight grip of the pharmaceutical companies and exhibit what I feel are blatant unethical collaborations that are not in the best interests of the patient at all. The following events happened at a surgery where I once worked.

DEXA scanners are bone scanners that look for osteoporosis. This is a disease caused by thinning of the bones that can occur in people from middle age onwards and can contribute to the likelihood of breaking a bone, particularly in later life. The scanner measures how dense the bone is. For those people at risk of having thin bones, the scanner can identify those who might benefit from taking calcium supplements and another type of medicine that can prevent bones from thinning further. These scans are available on the NHS and big studies have shown who is likely to be at risk and therefore which of our patients we should refer for scanning.

At the practice at which I was working, a drug company offered the senior partner a significant amount of money in order to allow them to scan our patients in the surgery with one of their mobile scanners. The mobile scanner is not as accurate as the big scanner that is available free of charge at the hospital. The senior partner phoned round many of her middle-aged, worried well patients and offered them a free scan at the surgery. Although they didn’t fit the criteria for being at risk of having osteoporosis, most of them jumped at the chance to have a free scan that would be conveniently done at the surgery. They also had all heard of osteoporosis and wanted to ensure that they weren’t at risk. The scanner appeared to overestimate how thin their bones were and therefore many of them were inaccurately diagnosed as having osteoporosis. These patients were then started on a medicine to keep their bones from supposedly deteriorating further. The senior partner was free to prescribe any medicine, but chose to prescribe the one that is made by the drug company that provided the scanner. This drug is considerably more expensive than other medications that are equally effective and costs the NHS £170 extra per year per patient.

I am very pleased to say that this sort of thing only still occurs in a very few practices and is being clamped down on. Our PCT has learnt a few tricks from the drug companies. We are still bribed to prescribe certain drugs but it is now the PCT that does the bribing. The practices in our local area are given targets to prescribe the cheaper drugs and if we hit the targets, we earn financial bonuses. This may seem crazy but the PCT have realised that for some GPs the only way to ensure that our drug spending is kept down is to reward us financially. The money they pay us for hitting the targets is nothing compared to the money saved by the NHS if we prescribe the cheaper generics. Yet again it feels embarrassing that doctors need financial incentives to prescribe sensibly.