March 1st, 2012 - (ESC Board) -Healthcare Regulatory update

“Unrestricted grants” may be a way forward, where money is given with no say in how it is spent in terms of education or course content.

Industry funding toward continuing medical education (CME) remains essential, according to a new white paper on the subject from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), published in the March 2012 issue of the European Heart Journal.

Delivering high-quality unbiased medical education funded by grants from pharmaceutical companies has always been perceived as a delicate issue.

Some say there may be better models that could be preferable in terms of ensuring complete independence of the educational programs produced.

We can dream about an ideal world where industry would be completely eliminated from CME. Nevertheless CME is expensive and relying completely on doctors or public funding is not a viable option at the current time, and nor is it likely to be so in the foreseeable future.

Dr Reinhard Griebenow, chair of European Board of Accreditation in Cardiology and Dr Jeffrey Tabas (University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine) advocate the idea to keep industry funding as independent as possible by defining more precisely what “unrestricted grant” really means. Drug and device makers would give academic institutions or societies a grant for "projects," and the society could then decide what topic to use it for. "That would be truly unrestricted, and a big step forward."

http://www.theheart.org/article/1368107.do