The NHS and the pharmaceutical industry: high risk of harmful interactions

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’.