Nurses not "opening-doors" for drug sales

Pharmaceutical firm-sponsored nurses are not "opening doors" to sales representatives as a softening-up process designed to promote new drugs, say drug companies targeted by a Sunday Times report. The article, which appeared in the March 3 edition of the UK's weekly news-paper, implied that, although nurses are barred from pro-moting their pharmaceutical firms' products, the bonuses they can receive for meeting targets in the number of patients or records they view, is related to increased prescription of new drugs.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry told the Marketletter that, if the allegations were true, these would violate the new code of conduct of the asso-ciation. Spokesmen for the UK's biggest drugmaker, GlaxoSmithKline, world number one by sales Pfizer and US major Wyeth, all confirmed to the Marketletter that they did not employ sponsored nurses as an auxilliary sales force. The three companies were named in the Sun-day Times article. The newspaper also reported that Matt Griffiths, from the Royal College of Nursing, expressed the opinion that any nurse being paid bonuses to pro-mote products would almost certainly be in breach of the Nursing and Midwifery Council's code of conduct.

Patients get 1/2 hour with a specialist nurse