Patient groups should be playing a central role in Canada’s health-care system, advocating for their members by promoting the visibility of their conditions, pushing for more rapid and accurate diagnoses and lobbying for the introduction and funding of new treatments and drugs that may help relieve their members’ symptoms and extend their lives. However, all of this requires resources. In the past, groups could turn to the federal government for funding, but that option dried up in the late 1980s and early 1990s .
Pharmaceutical industry funding In response, patient groups looked to the pharmaceutical industry to be able to continue functioning. How much money Canadian groups get from drug companies is largely unknown. Neither the federal government nor the major industry association, Innovative Medicines Canada (IMC), require companies to report on payments to groups and similarly there are no rules saying that patient groups must reveal who gives them money or how much.
Even if groups are registered charities, that type of granular information is not collected in reports they have to file with the Canada Revenue Agency. There is one source of partial information that has not been investigated until now. Since 2016, six companies have voluntarily released detailed annual statements about which groups they give money to and the value of those payments — GlaxoSmithKline , Merck , Novartis , Roche , Sanofi and Teva .
I have analyzed the available reports from these compan.
