Make the exercise meaningful
The Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) has instructed all central government-run hospitals not to permit medical representatives in the hospital premises.
The decision has been taken with a view to prevent Medical representatives from meeting doctors in central government hospitals to safeguard patients’ interests and maintain ethical standards.
The meetings between medical representatives and doctors across hospitals in India have been a point of contention for many years now. The role medical representatives have been playing over the years has brought many questions to the fore that need to be addressed in order to ensure that ethical practices are followed while prescribing medicines and other health gadgets to the patients.
Over the years many questions have been raised over the way companies have been involving their sales force to get doctors on board so that they prescribe only the medicines and gadgets to the patients that bring huge profits for the manufacturing companies.
This practice of roping in doctors by companies and medical representatives have been growing murkier with every passing day as companies got involved in cut throat competition to woo doctors and get their brands advanced and endorsed by them .
The competition has reached a level where doctors are provided huge benefits and services by the companies and medical representatives that at times the patient care and ethical practices module is not adhered to.
This being the reason that the government has been stressing on curtailing the nexus between companies, medical representatives and doctors so that ethical practices are followed while prescribing medicines and medical gadgets to patients.
Interestingly, the business volumes on medicines and medical gadgets are so huge that companies have been exerting in a huge way to woo doctors towards them and in the process patient care and ethical practices take a hit.
Since the government has been stressing on curtailing this practice many decisions have been enforced in the past as well where an effort was made to stop or curtail such exercises.
One such practice was to ensure that doctors prescribe medicine only under generic name and avoid prescribing brands. Though an order too has been issued here as well but the order has not been put in practice.
As of now the doctors are not adhering to prescribing only generic medicines but a whole lot of brands are being prescribed which has meant that the entire exercise carried out by the government has not brought any fruitful results.
Now that the idea of ban visits of medical representatives to central government run hospitals has been put in vogue, the need of the hour is to see that such moves bring the desired results that they were meant for.
Otherwise, the whole exercise will be nothing but the repetition of the same old practice that did not withstand the test of time.
