The main focus of our research is on collaborations between drug companies and other healthcare actors, including healthcare providers, medical societies, and patient organisations.

These partnerships can bring important benefits to patients and the health service, but they can also result in conflicts of interest that undermine patient care, medical research and good stewardship of public funding.

Informed by sociological and policy research, the project will examine the structure determinants and possible effects of payments drug companies make to facilitate these partnerships. We’ll also examine how collaborations with drug companies are governed and whether patients and members of the public have access to reliable information about any potential conflicts of interest that may be involved in them.

In following the industry money, we utilise drug company payment disclosures, a novel source of data that has been made publicly available as a result of a global policy trend towards enhanced transparency as a form of good governance.

We use both existing datasets of financial transfers and create them by scrapping and compiling dispersed financial disclosures or submitting freedom of information requests.

We have conducted many country case studies (including the United Kingdom and its constituent parts, Sweden and Japan), structured comparisons of several countries (the Nordics), and comparative analyses of 37 European countries. Key methods of analysis include regression models and social network analysis.

The project is interdisciplinary in nature, involving collaboration with healthcare professionals from the Medical Governance Research Institute (Japan), the University of St Andrews (Scotland), the Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland), as well as with investigative journalists (including from The British Medical Journal (BMJ)).

This project emerged from a long-standing collaboration between Bath’s Department of Social and Policy Sciences and Lund University (Sweden), and has now grown into a global network of project partners based in Scotland, Ireland, Poland, and Japan.

Funding

This project is funded by the Swedish Research Council. The funding amount is 3,789,000 SEK (Swedish Krona), which is around £285,000

Project team and partners

Project team

• Dr Piotr Ozieranski
• Emily Rickard
• Eszter Saghy

Project partners

Lund University, Sweden

• Dr Shai Mulinari

Medical Governance Research Institute, Japan

• Dr Akihiko Ozaki
• Dr Hiroaki Saito
• Dr Tetsuya Tanimoto
• Mr Anju Murayama

RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Ireland

• Professor Tom Fahey
• Dr Frank Moriarty
• Dr James Larkin

University of St Andrews

• Dr Margaret McCartney

Kozminski University, Poland

• Dr Marta Makowska

Project outputs

United Kingdom

• Unethical pharmaceutical marketing: a common problem requiring collective responsibility
• Pharmaceutical industry payments to NHS trusts in England: A four-year analysis of the Disclosure UK database
• Comparing pharmaceutical company payments in the four UK countries: a cross-sectional and social network analysis
• A 'patient-industry complex'? Investigating the financial dependency of UK patient organisations on drug company funding
• A hidden web of policy influence: The pharmaceutical industry’s engagement with UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Groups
• Drug company payments to General Practices in England: Cross-sectional and social network analysis

Europe

• Tip of the Iceberg? Country- and company-level analysis of drug company payments for research and development in Europe
• Accessibility and quality of drug company disclosures of payments to healthcare professionals and organisations in 37 countries: A European policy review
• Pharmaceutical industry self-regulation and non-transparency: country and company level analysis of payments to healthcare professionals in seven European countries

Nordic Countries

• Advancing international comparison of pharmaceutical industry funding of patient advocacy: Focus on Denmark
• Disclosure of Pharmaceutical Industry Funding of Patient Organisations in Nordic Countries: Can Industry Self-Regulation Deliver on its Transparency Promise?

Project outputs (United States and Japan)

United States

• Capitalizing on transparency: Commercial surveillance and pharmaceutical marketing after the Physician Sunshine Act
• Evaluation of Financial and Non-financial Conflicts of Interest and Quality of Evidence underlying Psoriatic Arthritis Clinical Practice Guidelines-Analysis of Personal Payments from Pharmaceutical Companies and Authors' Self-citation Rate in Japan and the United States

Japan

• Evaluation of Financial and Non-financial Conflicts of Interest and Quality of Evidence underlying Psoriatic Arthritis Clinical Practice Guidelines-Analysis of Personal Payments from Pharmaceutical Companies and Authors' Self-citation Rate in Japan and the United States
• How Do Institutional Conflicts of Interest Between Pharmaceutical Companies and the Healthcare Sector Become Corrupt? A Case Study of Scholarship Donations Between Department of Clinical Anesthesiology, Mie University, and Ono Pharmaceutical in Japan