The characteristics of conflict of interest in the doctor’spharmaceutical representative Relationship

Background: Studies addressed the influence of pharmaceutical representatives in drug prescribing habits, in terms of quality and quantity. Aim: To describe the representatives’ strategies, assess their impact on medical prescribing, and study the various factors influencing doctors’ prescribing changes. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study including 70 participants. All of them had an anonymous questionnaire to determine their socio-demographic data, the pharmaceutical representative visits details, the influence of gifts on the medical prescription, and the predictive factors of this influence. We also analyzed the solutions to alleviate the conflict of interest. Results: We found that 52.8% of participants thought that gifts were the source of an ethical dilemma and 85.7% of them thought that the priority of the pharmaceutical representative was the promotion of the product rather than the scientific interest. However, 68.5% of them thought that the gifts were useful and therefore we can continue to receive them. Nineteen participants (27.1% of cases) thought that gifts can modify their medical prescription. However, there were significantly more subjects (p=0.049) who thought that other colleagues would be more influenced (72.8%). Factors that favor the prescription changing by gifts, were age (p=0.002, OR=1.2) and the number of visits per month (p=0.015, OR=8.8). Conclusions: There is a discrepancy between the growing awareness of this ethical issue and the daily practices of physicians who continue to accept gifts. The absence of training in bioethics explains these results.