[Quality of pharma rep meetings in general practice].

Background: For many general practitioners (GPs), visits from pharmaceutical representatives (reps) are common settings for receiving updated drug information. We here aim to describe the content and assess the quality of information provided by reps visiting Norwegian GPs.
Material and Method: Medical students filled in a questionnaire addressing one pharma rep visit they had experienced during their 6-week general practice period in their fifth year at medical school in Oslo (2001 and 2002).
Results: Students from three classes participated and 144/241 (60 %) of them returned completed questionnaires. The 144 pharma rep meetings addressed 64 different and mostly new drugs, most commonly cardiovascular and pulmonary preparations. The visit was most commonly conducted during a free lunch (90 %) for the entire practice staff (81 %). The representatives offered the GPs free drug samples (41 %), and small presents (44 %). Four of five visits were characterized by incomplete or lacking information about side effects, interactions, contraindications or precautions for using the drug. The students scored their educational benefit from the session on a visual analogue scale from 0 (poor) to 10 (excellent), which revealed a mean score of less than neutral, 4.2.
Interpretation: The systematic omittance of important safety information, emphasizes the need for industry unbiased continuing medical drug education in general practice.