McCartney Margaret
University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland.
Future Healthc J. 2025 Jun 30;12(2):100257. doi: 10.1016/j.fhj.2025.100257. eCollection 2025 Jun.
The pharmaceutical industry has been responsible for many interventions of great benefit to patients. However, great harm to patients and healthcare systems have been created through conflicts of interest, when the behaviours of individual doctors and healthcare systems have been compromised and patient harm has resulted. The interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the NHS cannot be assumed to overlap. This means that medical decision making should be as independent and unbiased as possible. Transparency about conflicts is important, but should be a means to the end it must be part of a system which stops conflicts harming patients and healthcare systems. Given the uncertainty of how the benefits of transparency can be used in practice, it is an imperative that conflicts are avoided, and not just 'managed'.
制药行业促成了许多对患者大有裨益的干预措施。然而,当个别医生的行为和医疗保健系统受到利益冲突的影响并导致患者受到伤害时,就会对患者和医疗保健系统造成巨大损害。不能假定制药行业和英国国家医疗服务体系(NHS)的利益是重叠的。这意味着医疗决策应尽可能独立且公正。冲突的透明度很重要,但它应该是实现目的的一种手段,它必须成为一个防止冲突损害患者和医疗保健系统的体系的一部分。鉴于在实践中如何利用透明度带来的益处存在不确定性,必须避免冲突,而不仅仅是“管理”冲突。