From The College February 2006

The complete newsletter is available in PDF format, below.

Featured Article

ACR Adopts Principles Governing Industry Support for Training

The ACR recognizes that it is essential to work cooperatively with industry, whose continued support of many activities is vital to the work of the College. Nonetheless the potential conflict of interest between physicians and industry is real, documented, and a focus of growing public concern and scrutiny.

For these reasons, the ACR is aware that it is essential to carefully manage the relationship it has with industry. This is especially true with regard to relationships between industry and rheumatology fellowship training programs, as well as the fellows in those programs.

The funding of rheumatology training programs, like all medical subspecialty programs in the U.S., depends upon a fragile patchwork of private and public resources that is neither adequate nor dependable. Training programs have, in fact, become reliant in many cases on the largesse of industry to address many needs that are consistent with their educational missions.

Yet, such dependence upon industry comes with a price and has the potential to threaten the professional integrity of training programs. Reliance upon the pharmaceutical/biotechnology industry for direct financial support jeopardizes the ability of training programs to remain free of marketing influences - a fundamental imperative of professional training programs in medicine. Some of these arrangements of support leave training directors and/or individual fellows with an inappropriate but inevitable sense of obligation to industry that undermines professionalism.

Instilling the value of professionalism is a fundamental and preeminent goal of every training program. At the core of professionalism is the primacy of the patient's interests over the self-interest of the physician. Public trust for physicians and the institutions that train them is based upon the presumption that professionalism lies at the heart of their value system.

It is, therefore, the duty of rheumatology training programs and the ACR, as the professional society that represents them, to ensure that rheumatology training is free from those influences that may threaten professionalism. These efforts proceed while recognizing the significant contribution that industry makes in supporting the educational mission of training programs. Focusing this support on an educational agenda that is established by the training
programs is essential.

To help guide training programs, fellows and industry in their relationships, the committee on Workforce and Training has developed a document entitled “Principles Governing Industry Support for Rheumatology Fellowship Training.”

The complete document is posted online on the fellows home page, www.rheumatology.org/
fellows.