Introduction

Pharmaceutical companies are the main source of therapeutic innovations in medicine, thus playing an important role in continuing medical education (CME).

Objectives

To study physicians’thoughts on conflicts of interests at CME events.

Methodology

Physiciansworkingat a Brazilian public university responded to a questionnaire featuring open and closed questions, with qualitative data studied according to a content analysis and quantitative data subjected to a proper statistical analysis.

Results

76 physicians answered the questionnaire, with 55.3% considering conflicts of interests to constitute‘situations’ and 44.7% seeingthem as a form of‘behavior’. Besides financial support for research related to the presentations, the majority of participants pointed to six other kinds of industry/speaker relationship in which a declaration should be mandatory. Only 50% of speakers and 18% of listeners feel prepared to deal with pharmaceutical companies’ issues.

Final considerations

Medical schools and medical representative entities should work toward improving physicians’ understanding of this issue and creating objective rules on what must be declared.

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