The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 273 No 7325 p707
13 November 2004

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New prescribers may be susceptible to promotion

Supplementary prescribing may make pharmacists more susceptible to promotional pressure from pharmaceutical companies and additional training may be needed to counter this, warned the panel of a seminar last week organised by APRIL (the adverse psychiatric reactions information link charity).

Answering a question from the floor, Charles Medawar, director of campaigning group Social Audit Ltd, said nurses and pharmacists would be perfectly capable of prescribing, but added: “What does concern me is that we will introduce two new classes of prescribers who would be prey to the promotional efforts of pharmaceutical companies. That’s where I think the real danger lies.”

Commenting later, he added: “Given experience with pharmaceutical promotion in general practice, one would expect the pharmaceutical and nursing professions to develop training programmes and enforceable standards of practice.”

Andrew Herxheimer, co-founder of DIPEx, a web-based health resource, said that for particular classes of drugs, such as oral contraceptives, there would be advantages to allowing pharmacists and nurses to prescribe, but that there is a general need to be more discriminating when prescribing than is the case at the moment and that increasing the number of people who are able to prescribe is unlikely to achieve this.

He told The Journal that he could not tell whether pharmacists and nurses would be any more or less likely to prescribe inappropriately than doctors, but that the additional training they received in rational prescribing may help to make it less likely.