Effect of Gifts and Sponsorships on Acceptance of High Priced Prescription Drugs by Doctors: A Study
Keywords:
Prescriptions, gifts, sponsorships, medical representative, brandsAbstract
Doctors are usually ready to accept gifts or sponsorships when given by medical representatives. Doctors travel a lot to attend seminars, workshops and conferences and may take their family along with them too as a get away from their routine. As a result they may look for their trip to be sponsored by companies and in return are ready to prescribe the high priced products of companies. The study was conducted to find out if gifts and sponsorships have an effect on the prescription pattern of doctors when it comes to prescribing high priced products. Since gifts and sponsorships should be desired by doctors it would be interesting to find out the effect of these two variables on the acceptance of the pricing of products by companies to doctors. Fifty doctors from urban areas and fifty doctors from rural areas were selected for the study. The findings were that doctors in rural areas favoured high priced products when gifted whereas doctors in urban areas favoured high priced products when sponsored for conferences or seminars.
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