GRS Blog

Europe’s Revised Information Proposals: An Olive Branch to Patients and Industry?

13/10/2011

No-one would deny that there was significant pressure on John Dalli, the European Commissioner for Health, to strike a delicate balance that appeased both industry and patient groups when he outlined the Commission’s revised proposals on information to patients this week.

In recent years this political hot potato has become, according to Applied Clinical Trials’ Peter O’ Donnell, an “explosive cocktail of debate,” one that has been made “all the more volatile by the proliferation of on-line information about medicines, much of it of dubious reliability.”

The EC’s original 2008 proposals seemed to please neither group. Industry may not have been surprised by the continuation of the full advertising ban on prescription-only medicines, but it had increasingly called for concessions for the ‘empowered’ European patient. Conversely, the  European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) —which comprises patient organizations, HCPs and NGOs — was concerned about the Pharmaceutical Forum’s “lack of transparency and representativeness” and called the proposals “just a disguised way of giving pharmaceutical companies enough flexibility to promote their products directly to the public, in order to boost the sector’s growth.” Europe’s own politicians also joined the fray, German MEP Jorgo Chatzimarkakis being unequivocal on the information-to-patients issue, declaring it a “fundamental principle in a democratic society that citizens have a right to access information.”  

Author: Greer Deal, Director of Global Regulatory Services