OUR GLOBAL MOVEMENT
“Business Principles for Promoting Integrity in the Pharmaceutical Sector in Latin America” (Pharma Integrity Principles), is a set of new principles focused on strengthening ethical standards across the pharmaceutical sector in Latin America, promoting integrity and ethical business practices.
The Pharma Integrity Principles for Latin America aim to promote integrity in the pharmaceutical sector and guide companies in:
These principles serve to complement the existing efforts of the industry at a local and regional level to promote integrity and ethical business practices in the pharmaceutical sector, as further detailed in the Pharma Integrity Principles document.
TI’s Pharmaceuticals & Healthcare Programmes’s new report “Making the Case for Open Contracting in Healthcare Procurement” examines the utility of open contracting in healthcare procurement. The process relies on governments to disclose procurement information to businesses and civil society improves stakeholders’ understanding of procurement processes increasing the integrity, fairness and efficiency of public contracting.
In several countries, including Honduras, Ukraine and Nigeria, corruption was significantly reduced throughout the healthcare procurement process following the implementation of open contracting, according to the report.
This new publication takes a broad look at health systems across the globe and identifies 8 areas highly vulnerable to corruption:
Health system governance / Health system regulation / Research and development / Marketing / Procurement / Product distribution and storage / Financial and workforce management / Delivery of healthcare services
As part of this research TI-PHP interviewed a series of health experts and anti-corruption specialists. Some went as far as to argue that the whole system is broken, as multiple individuals, companies and groups involved in healthcare are placing their private self-interests over wider public health goals.
One expert told of a case where a doctor in America was falsely prescribing chemotherapy to patients in order to pocket millions of dollars of fake claims. In too many instances this dramatically decreased the quality of life for patients beyond treatment, and even resulted in deaths.
