gms | German Medical Science

Background/research question: Most medical students are in contact with the pharmaceutical or medical device industry during their studies. Medical schools play an important role in protecting students from undue commercial influence and educating them about pharmaceutical marketing practices. While in North America many medical schools introduced conflicts of interest (COI) policies, only few institutional policies were reported in Germany. We aimed to analyze the quantity and quality of such policies and curricular teaching activities on COI at medical schools in Germany.

Methods: We collected relevant COI policies and teaching activities by conducting a search of the websites of all 38 German medical schools using standardized keywords for COI policies and teaching. Further, we surveyed all medical schools’ dean’s offices and adapted a scoring system used in earlier studies in the French and North American context. We then calculated summary scores for each school based on 13 criteria. Possible scores ranged between 0-26 (lower scores denoting a weaker policy).

Results: We identified relevant policies for one medical school via the web-search. The total response rate of the deans’ survey was 16 of 38 (42.1%). In total, we identified COI-related policies for 2 of 38 (5.3%) of German medical schools, yet no policy was sufficient to address all COI-related categories that were assessed in this study. The maximum score achieved was 12 of 26 via an anti-corruption directive. 36 (94.7%) schools scored 0. No medical school reported curricular teaching on COI.

Conclusion: We present the first qualitative review of medical school COI policies in Germany. Our results indicate a low level of action by medical schools to protect students from undue commercial influence and no participating dean was aware of any teaching on COI at their respective school. The German Medical Students Association as well as international counterparts have called for a stronger focus on COI in the classroom. We conclude that for German medical schools there is still a long way to go.

Competing interests: PG, LH, ZF, SG, LS, MS, ST, TW are members of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines Europe e.V.

PG, LH and DK are members of MEZIS, a german no-free-lunch group.

A public declaration of DK's COIs can be retrieved from https://www.akdae.de/Kommission/Organisation/Mitglieder/DoI/Klemperer.pdf