Suchergebnisse

Abstract

In recent years, the marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry have been subject to scrutiny and criticism. In the UK, prescription‐only (PO) medicines cannot be marketed directly to the public, and marketing to health professionals is self‐regulated by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry's (ABPI) Code of Practice.
This study uses internal document analyses to examine the effectiveness of this regulatory framework. Specifically, a qualitative analysis was conducted of internal marketing documents from five UK pharmaceutical companies which were obtained by the House of Commons Health Committee. This analysis suggests that major pharmaceutical companies are contravening the ABPI Code in four key areas.
The authors conclude that the current system is not effectively regulating the marketing of PO medicines to the general public or health professionals in the UK and suggest that the Code and indeed the whole regulatory procedure needs a thorough review.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Social marketers are concerned both with the use of marketing to improve health, and in critically scrutinizing the impact of commercial marketing practices on health. This latter area is relatively underdeveloped. It requires the development of relevant and robust research tools. This article is concerned with developing an observation measure designed to explore the industry's response to tobacco marketing regulation in retail outlets. Given the restrictions on both direct and indirect forms of tobacco marketing in the UK, there has been scope for the tobacco industry to focus their marketing efforts in other areas, such as point of sale. A protocol has been developed to enable observation of any changes in the marketing tactics employed by the UK tobacco industry at the retailer level. This article describes the observation proforma designed to gauge activity, and provides guidance for administering such a measure on a longitudinal basis. The measure was generally reliable, and suggests that tobacco marketing at point of sale might be targeted towards lower socioeconomic status areas.