Doctors get €2m from five drug firms

Five drugs companies together made in excess of €2m in payments to 1,200 named doctors last year, disclosure records show.

The same five, AbbVie, Menarini, MSD, Novartis, and Pfizer, also transferred €1,010,997 in at least 623 payments to unnamed doctors.

Those doctors cannot be named because they have not given consent for the payment to be disclosed, so only aggregate figures can be made public by the firms.

Whether those doctors object to disclosure or simply omitted to provide their consent is unclear although, in most cases, consent is only a matter of ticking a box when a payment is agreed.

The figures are recorded by the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHA) in its Transfers of Value register, which has collected data from 44 drugs firms for the last three years.

It is part of a voluntary initiative from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations which required member groups, such as the IPHA, to make disclosure part of their code of practice.

In total, the 44 companies made €29,424,793 transfers of value in 2017, a similar figure to the €30.1m made in 2016 and the €27.2m in 2015.

As in other years, the amount paid to individual healthcare practitioners last year — €6.6m — worked out at about a quarter of the total. About one third went to healthcare organisations such as hospitals, colleges, and research foundations, and the rest took the form of research and development funding, including clinical trials support, to personnel outside of the companies.

Payments to named practitioners fall mainly under the categories of contributions to the costs of attending events, such as registration fees and travel and accommodation expenses, and fees for service and consultancy including related expenses.

Amounts vary greatly from under €100 to over €20,000. Some doctors were in receipt of payments at the higher end of the scale from several different companies.

Many patient and professional organisations also received payments, mainly in the form of grants, donations,and event sponsorship.

AbbVie Ltd, which has three manufacturing facilities and two sales offices in Ireland, paid the most to healthcare organisations last year, a total of €1,144,358 to 61 organisations.

They included payments under the heading of donations and grants of €48,000 to Beaumont Hospital, €49,735 to the Mater University Hospital, €109,533 to NUI Galway, €100,000 to the Royal College of Physicians, €56,000 to the St James’ Hospital Foundation, €185,000 to the UCD Foundation, and €57,400 to University Hospital Limerick, as well as sponsorships worth €65,588 to the Irish Society for Rheumatology and €50,880 to medical conference organisers Medical Spaces Ltd.

The biggest total sum disclosed by a firm last year, €3,883,068, was from Allergan Pharmaceuticals

Many payments were made to research foundations attached to hospitals both public and private, but in a number of cases, the recipients were named as HSE public accounts.