Project Area: Health policy and systems research
Project Summary
Hundreds of millions of euro are paid by medical-device companies to physicians and healthcare organisations for medical education. Research suggests that medical device payments such as these lead to sub-optimal medical device choice, thus undermining patient care. Also, medical device industry payments such as these have been used as a pretext for illegal payments to physicians to procure certain medical products. A US Institute of Medicine report concluded that: industry relationships with healthcare can ‘threaten the objectivity of medical research, education, and practice and undermine public trust’. Medical-devices are a vital component of health service delivery, used for diagnosis, treatment, and as aids to everyday activities. Despite all of this, most research has examined the role of pharmaceutical industry payments in healthcare. This PhD project aims to develop a detailed picture of the medical device industry’s education-related payments in Europe, the effects these payments have on medical-device decision-making and the relationship physicians have with the medical device industry. This will involve a systematic review, an observational study of a large database (transparentmedtech.eu), and a qualitative interview study of physicians. Therefore, this PhD will offer any prospective student the chance to develop skills in a range of areas. All of which will be under the supervision of a multidisciplinary team along with international collaborators with expertise in the area.
Supervisory Team:
Prof. Tom Fahey (Principal Investigator)- Professor of General Practice, Department of General Practice, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences
Dr. James Larkin – Post-doctoral researcher, Department of General Practice, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences
Dr. Frank Moriarty – Senior lecturer, School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences
Other team members:
Dr. Shai Mulinari, Associate professor, Department of Sociology, Lund University
Dr. Piotr Ozieranski, Senior Lecturer, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath
Dr. Mélissa Mialon, Assistant Professor, Business School, Trinity College Dublin
Prof. John M. O’Byrne, Consultant Trauma & Orthopaedic Surgeon, Cappagh National Orthopaedic Hospital
This project will be based at RCSI
