Transparency must be at the heart of medicine. Patients demand a UK Sunshine Act to help address a longstanding wrong in modern healthcare

Summary

The UK boasts an ambition of being a life sciences superpower, yet with great power comes great responsibility. Advocates like Sling The Mesh fear that the health sector has become a free-for-all with a focus on profits before patient safety. Which is why Ruth MacLeod and Kath Sansom of Sling the Mesh campaign are urging the new Government to put transparency at the heart of its plans on healthcare.

We urgently need a UK Sunshine Act, making it a legal obligation for the pharmaceutical and device industry to log all monies they give to the health sector, with this payment information to be held on a central, public register.

This transparency would enable us to determine when potential bias can creep into prescribing, the scientific literature and on a more subtle level, into clinical consensus via the use of key opinion leaders.

Yet the General Medical Council have made it clear they do not wish to hold such a register. And as patient safety advocates, Ruth and Kath believe it is unacceptable for it to be held by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, or any other industry body – as suggested in a recent Government consultation.

Instead, the information should be held on Government-run open database which would give researchers, journalists, campaigners, and the public the ability to search up the scope and scale of industry monies, to gauge their impact.