Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Direct-to-consumer communication (DTCC) of pharmaceutical drugs refers to all messages sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, disseminated mostly through television, magazines, and the Internet. Although visions may be highly polarized about its benefits and risks, both proponents and opponents agree that DTCC has strong potential to shape treatment-seeking behaviours and influence interactions between patients and their healthcare providers. Thus, ethical guidance and regulation are needed. However, current national and international regulation of DTCC is deficient in two ways. First, it lacks consistency between countries, causing citizens of countries with strongly prohibitive regulation to receive unregulated communications that transcended national boundaries. Second, regulation lags behind industry practices, allowing new means of communications such as social media and mobile applications to remain unregulated. Various stakeholders have different visions of how to regulate DTCC and there is a need to better understand the sources of their disagreements and the rationale for current regulations. Historically, there has been very little discussion between various stakeholders, locally in a given country, or globally between various countries to ensure consistency. This project aims to initiate an international conversation between industry decision-makers and public policy-makers, as a means to generate consensual ideas to 1) bring DTCC ethical guidance and regulation up-to-date with current and emerging technology use, and 2) improve coherence in ethical guidance and regulation between countries. Ultimately, this project will contribute to improving patients' experience of healthcare delivery because a smarter and better coordinated approach to DTCC regulation will enable respect of the values at the very root of regulation, that is, the duty to protect public health and enable patients to make fully informed and autonomous decisions.