India’s Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) has yet to share the names of 30 doctors with the country’s top medical regulator — more than four months after recommending action against them for accepting pharmaceutical-sponsored trips to Monaco and Paris.
The National Medical Commission (NMC) has revealed in a May 8 response to a Right to Information (RTI) query by a Kerala-based ophthalmologist and RTI activist that the list of 30 doctors “is yet to be received by the commission”.
Ophthalmologist-activist K.V. Babu had used the RTI route to ask the NMC for the list of 30 doctors against whom the DoP’s apex committee on pharma marketing practices had sought action in a four-page order dated December 23, 2024.
In the order, the DoP committee had reprimanded Abbvie Healthcare India for “unethical marketing” and asked the NMC to act against the 30 doctors who it said had breached ethical regulations by accepting travel and hospitality.
The committee, acting on an anonymous complaint to the DoP, had observed that Abbvie Healthcare had violated the Uniform Code for Pharmaceuticals and Marketing Practices (UCPMP) by funding travel and accommodation for 24 doctors to Monaco and six doctors to Paris in February-March 2024.
The DoP’s UCPMP 2024, an updated version of a 2015 notification, prohibits gifts, travel, hospitality, or pecuniary benefits from pharmaceutical companies to doctors.
And ethical guidelines mandatory for doctors require them to decline any such
hospitality.
“The RTI response from the NMC suggests that the department of pharmaceuticals has not yet shared the list of the 30 doctors against whom the committee had sought action,” Babu said on Tuesday. “Without follow-up action, the December 23 order would be an eyewash.”
Babu said he had also filed an RTI query and six reminders to the DoP seeking information about the 30 doctors and copies of the correspondence between the
committee and Abbvie Healthcare but had received no response yet.
The anonymous complaint received by the DoP had alleged that Abbvie had provided travel tickets and hotel accommodation to the 30 doctors for “extravagant
pleasure trips under the guise of a conference connected to medical aesthetics and anti-ageing”.
The supporting documents included Abbvie’s “internal records, featuring a sales and expense tracker, outlining the expenditures for each doctor’s travel and copies of flight tickets and hotel booking vouchers”, the DoP committee
had noted.
The total expenditure on the trips amounted to around ₹1.91 crore and represented an explicit contravention of the code’s provisions, the DoP committee had said in its December 23 order. Abbvie had claimed that it had entered into professional service agreements with the doctors to compensate them for their services which were
defined as “knowledge dissemination activity”.
The DoP committee said it had given an opportunity to Abbvie to take remedial action by supporting poor patients in government hospitals for an amount equivalent to the violations or figure out mechanisms to provide such aid, whether financially or otherwise. But Abbvie chose to reject the committee’s offer, the order said.
Pharma largesse to doctors has long been a controversial issue in the country amid concerns among sections of doctors that the practice of compensating doctors for “services” could expose some patients to inappropriate medicines and costs.