Across the month of January, we at PharmaBoardroom surveyed our executive readership on attitudes towards the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA)’s new Code of Practice, effective January 1st, 2019. To download the Code click here and to read our exclusive interview with Melissa Barnes, the IFPMA’s ethics head and Thomas Cueni, its director general, introducing the Code click here.
Our respondents tended to see the new Code of Practice in a positive light: a full 77 percent of respondents agreed with the Code’s key recommendation – a global ban of gifts and promotional aids for prescription medicines (see graphic below)
Awareness of the new Code among our readership was, however, fairly low, with 56 percent of respondents having not been aware of it prior to taking our survey.
We also asked our readers what they felt was the biggest ethical challenge for the pharmaceutical industry today. The most common response was ‘pricing’, while other individuals pointed to ‘inappropriate interactions with patient organizations’, ‘manipulation of clinical trial data’, and ‘a lack of transparency’ as their major ethical concerns.
