Nurses, Prescriptions and Pharma Influence– Under the Radar?
Filed under: Advertising & Lobbying, Pharma, Prescription Drugs
Very interesting point made over at Gary Schwitzer’s Health News Review Blog regarding Industry funding of Continuing Medical Education (CME) for Nurse Practitioners (if you’ve never visited Mr. Schwitzer’s blog you should, he is informative, well written and generally brief).
Seton Hall Law’s Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law & Policy issued a White Paper last year, “Drug and Device Promotion: Charting a Course for Policy Reform,” which called for a cessation of industry funding of CME. The Center noted:
Reforming Funding for Continuing Medical Education (CME). Most states require physicians to undertake continuing medical education to maintain their medical license. The drug and device industry currently funds over half of the accredited CME courses available to physicians. The Center recommends that industry funding for continuing medical education should be phased out, and replaced by an educational process driven by physicians.
And that
- Ninety-four percent of physicians have some kind of financial relationship with industry, as reported in a major recent national study.
- Commercial support for accredited CME, nearly all of it from drug and device manufacturers, grew from $302 million in 1998 to $1.2 billion in 2006.
But what about nurse practitioners? Schwitzer, who attended the recent Georgetown Conference, “Prescription for Conflict: Should Industry Fund Continuing Medical Education?” noted that:
There are more nurse practitioners (147,000) than there are family physicians (100,000) in the US.
These advance practice nurse professionals can write prescriptions, and it’s estimated that the average nurse practitioner writes more than 6,000 a year.
And about 70-80% of those nurses who regularly attended lunch or dinner “continuing education” events sponsored by drug companies said they were more likely to prescribe the drugs that were highlighted in the lunch.
The presenter was nurse-researcher Elissa Ladd, PhD, RN, Asst. Clinical Professor, Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions, who says the possible pharma influence on nurse-prescribers has largely flown “under the radar.”
A little quick and basic math will give us some inkling of just how much flies under that radar. We’ll use the minimum figure in all estimates. So…
147,000 Nurse Practioners each writing 6,000 prescriptions per year = 882,000,000 prescriptions. Yes, that’s 882 million prescriptions per year– conservatively estimated.
“More likely to prescribe the drugs that were highlighted in the lunch” we can estimate at 51%. We wind up with a potentially influenced 449,820,000 prescriptions. Again, conservatively estimated.
So now the only question is just what percentage or how many Nurse Practitioners “regularly attended lunch or dinner ‘continuing education’ events sponsored by drug companies?”
With a total pool of over 882 million prescriptions per year available– at least 450 million of them potentially swayed over lunch–my guess is that Pharma’s answer would be “As many as possible.”
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I on occasion go to CME dinners, and I still write drugs I choose or that are covered under my patients plan. While there are those that might be influenced, shame on them for just writing some thing with out investigating it first. I have never written a drug based on a sales reps dinners or propaganda.