The drugs don’t work

Health Technology Assessment is not 'pure science'. The drug industry is a key actor in the process of issuing recommendations" - —Professor Larry King King and colleagues Piotr Ozieranski (University of Leicester) and Martin McKee (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) found that multinational drug companies are deploying their massive financial resources to capture stakeholders at every stage of the process for the scientific recommendation of drugs in Poland. Through direct and indirect methods, many of which remain hidden from public view, some of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies, as well as politicians, are exercising influence over the drug evaluation programme in Poland - which is overseen by the Polish Agency for Health Technology Assessment (AHTAPol). Their ground-breaking findings are published in the December issue of Health Policy . King and his colleagues conducted more than 100 s with people on all sides of the process, as well drawing data from more than 270 scientific recommendations on drugs issued by the AHTAPol, which Poland's Minister for Health recently announced is in line to be replaced. King said: "HTA (Health Technology Assessment) has traditionally been portrayed as a sophisticated scientific process providing quantifiable evidence-based recommendations for decision-makers, but our sociological studies have found that HTA is not 'pure science'; the drug industry is a key actor in the process of issuing recommendations. "Our research is the first to look at HTA in Poland, the country with the largest pharmaceutical market in Central Europe and one which faces huge popular pressure at reimbursing novel drugs - as well as suffering from an underfinanced healthcare system.