About the standard
The Relationships with Industry standard was published in January 2010 and is under review to support regulated members in navigating this topic. Amendments and additions to this standard provide more information relating to conflicts of interest and teaching aids. Certain clauses relating to research were moved from this standard to the Human Health Research standard to support its relevancy.
What’s changed?
- Elements related to conflicts of interest added to ensure regulated members better understand expectations;
- Research-related clauses moved to draft Health Research standard to support content relevancy; and
- Information on teaching aids added for clarification.
View the draft standard
For your convenience, the draft standard has clean and marked copies available.
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Changes to CPSA’s Standards of Practice impact your day-to-day practice. Your feedback is important to us, as it helps us develop clear, reasonable expectations and helpful, applicable resources. We appreciate the time you took and the input you provided.
CPSA regulated members, partner organizations, other healthcare professionals and Albertans were invited to provide feedback from May 6 to June 5. Feedback was provided via survey, email or the comment form on each page.
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Other feedback on this standard
Vital document for conflict of interests, professional behaviour, and information supplied on current products.
In this standard, it references the "Human Health Research" Standard yet we are also renaming the Human Health Research standard to "Health Research". This should be consistent.
CPSA Reply:
Great catch – thank you!
I think the beefed up version is timely (likely overdue), mostly because there's already a fairly common public perception (rightly or wrongly) that doctors are "in the pockets" of the pharmaceutical industry, that will take robust action to erase - and it's important to erase, in order to maintain trust in the profession. Over my 25 years of practice, the more flagrant forms of bribery are seen less often, but I'm afraid that's because it's now more "scientific" rather than because either industry or docs have given up on the influence game.
I'd suggest a few minor edits. The third paragraph of the preamble reads "Conflicts of interest related to financial aspects can affect a regulated member’s objectivity..." but there are other non-financial COIs (e.g. reputational, academic career benefits, etc) that can equally affect members, with potential detriment to patients. Since the glossary defines COIs very well, I'd suggest cleaning that up slightly to "Conflicts of interests can affect a regulated member's objectivity..." Similarly, in paragraph 11, I'd suggest instead "...must disclose to participants any relationship with industry..."
Lastly, it's unclear how anyone would typically know what amounts a doc might be reimbursed financially for things like organizing/presenting CPD activities (these amounts certainly aren't disclosed publicly by the commercial entities!) and therefore it's impossible to know if those reimbursements "could reasonably be perceived as having undue influence". If the CPSA's mandate is to prevent docs being unduly affected by these payments, why not make this Standard really effective, and require that docs accepting any financial compensation from industry report the individual amounts on their annual RIF? Unless there's some benefit to secrecy here (to patients, individual docs, the profession, or the public), it's not an unreasonable ask. And if there IS some benefit to secrecy, that's a problem that needs tackling head-on.