Australian medical students given little protection from commercial influence of pharmaceutical companies, research finds

“Among the medical schools with disclosure policies, most require academics to disclose conflicts of interest internally, but not the students they teach,” Ms Hooimeyer said.

Only one other study, from 2009, has examined conflict-of-interest policies in Australian medical schools. The authors of the current study found there had been little progress in the past decade.

Ms Hooimeyer said medical schools in the US were much more advanced in developing policies designed to prevent influence from pharmaceutical companies.

Implications for prescribing

Poor policies can have devastating consequences. Ms Hooimeyer pointed to an industry-sponsored pain module which ran for seven years at Canada’s University of Toronto which downplayed the adverse effects of opioids and which characterised oxycodone as “weak”, which could have led to higher rates of prescribing.

She also found that rates of prescribing heavily marketed antidepressants and psychotropic medications were lower in medical schools that had appropriate policies.

The study found that the University of Queensland was ranked the best, while the University of Notre Dame and the University of Adelaide barely had any policies in place.

A spokeswoman for the University of Sydney said conflict of interest was taken seriously

“All our academic and professional staff and higher degree by research students are required to complete a declaration of external interests as part of an annual process – including those from our Medicine and Health faculty, regardless of their role or studies,” she said.

Ms Hooimeyer’s thesis supervisor is a global expert in the field of conflict of interest and also examines “disease mongering”, which involves the pharmaceutical industry manufacturing diseases to promote the prescription of drugs.

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