Abstract
General Practitioners' Willingness to Pay for Continuing Medical Education in A Fee-for-Service Universal Coverage Health Care System
Highlights
Sponsoring of physicians meetings by life science companies has led to reduced participation fees but might influence physician’s prescription practices
Our study reveals that despite the fact that most respondents did not agree that sponsoring influenced their own and their colleagues prescribing behaviour, 48% of Switzerland’s canton of Vaud general practitioners, for whom congresses are an important mean of continuing medical education (CME), were willing to pay more than what they currently pay to attend congresses
They did not support the introduction of a binding legislation prohibiting the sponsoring of congresses by life science companies but did approve the creation of a general fund set up by life science companies and centrally administered by an independent body as an alternative financing option
Summary
Sponsoring of physicians meetings by life science companies has led to reduced participation fees but might influence physician’s prescription practices. The questionnaire evaluated physicians’ willingness to pay for medical meetings, their perception of a bias in prescription practices induced by commercial support, their opinion on the introduction of a binding legislation and alternative financing options, their frequency of exchange with sales representatives and other relevant socioeconomic factors. Ongoing discussions in the medical literature are questioning whether this form of industrial marketing does not lead to potential drawbacks including conflict of interest as well as direct and indirect commercial products promotion through altered disease management and prescribing habits bias [6], possibly contributing to the rise of national health costs [7,8] This question is even more relevant in Switzerland, a country with a health care system combining fee for service and universal health insurance coverage, and where national health costs accounted for 10.8% of GDP in 2010 and are estimated at 11.9% of GDP in 2014 [9]
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