Purpose: The medical community continues to debate the proper boundaries of its’ relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. To contribute to this debate, this study collected data about the frequency and types of interactions between physician assistants (PAs) and pharmaceutical industry representatives (PRs) and what influence these interactions may have on PA prescribing practice.
Methods: This research was a multi-state, cross sectional study. Twenty American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) state chapters were randomly selected and invited to participate with 8 chapters agreeing to participate. Surveys from respondents who do not provide direct patient care and/or do not have prescriptive authority were excluded from the study. The survey contained questions pertaining to demographics, types and frequency of interaction, and level of influence these interactions may have had. In addition to descriptive statistics, the data was analyzed using the Kruskill-Wallis, Kendall’s tau and Spearman’s rho tests. This study has been approved by the UNTHSC IRB.
Results: There were 147 respondents to the survey of which 134 met inclusion criteria. Nearly half of the respondents (49%) indicated interaction with pharmaceutical representatives one or more times a week. Also, approximately one third of the respondents (29%) indicated receiving gifts of food and/or other items one or more times a week. Interactions differed depending on a PA’s medical specialty (X2 = 15.9, P = .001) and practice site (X2 = 26.0, P < .001). Fifty-seven percent of respondents agreed or somewhat agreed that pharmaceutical representatives influence the prescribing practices of most PAs. Correlations were found between the frequency of food and beverage received in the workplace and PR influence on respondent’s prescribing practices (t=.155, p = 0.048), as well as between the frequency of PA-PR interactions and the importance of pharmaceutical representatives in the PA’s understanding of new medications (t=.176, p = .020).
Conclusions: Our results indicate that PAs are interacting with pharmaceutical representatives and that those interactions often influence the prescribing practices of PAs. As such, PAs must be aware that their interactions with pharmaceutical representatives could influence their prescribing practices. PAs should also be included in discussion about ethical guidelines governing the relationship between healthcare providers and the pharmaceutical industry.