ABPI urges parliament to reject govt plan to ban "commercial" drug data

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry has urged membersof the House of Lords, the UK parliament's upper house, to throw out Clause 67 of the Health and Social Care Bill, which would stop drug manufacturers collecting information on drug use by doctors and patients.

The government says this prohibition is needed because companies can use such information to find out how particular drugs are selling in individual health authorities, and target their marketing activities to put pressure on the prescribing activities of general practitioners in the area, thus raising the National Health Service drugs bill unnecessarily. However, in a letter to all members of the Lords and to Health Minister Lord Hunt, ABPI director general Trevor Jones says the Secretary of State for Health should not be given such broad powers. Clause 67 would give him sweeping powers to prohibit, on a completely arbitrary basis, data on medicines gathered for "commercial purposes," according to Prof Jones, who added that these purposes "are not clearly defined, and could mean anything."

While such data collection is primarily funded by the pharmaceutical industry, he writes, a ban would affect not only the industry but also the work of many other groups, including patient and research organizations that currently have free use of the data. "This Clause goes against all the government's aims to improve the standard of health care through better monitoring and performance measurement in the NHS," he says. "Poor prescribing and poor patient care will now be left unchecked and unchallenged."