Farmacriticxs – Spain (IFMSA-Spain)

Name of the activity: Farmacriticxs

Country/NMO: Spain (IFMSA-Spain)

Program: Ethics & Human Rights in Health

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Campaign

General description:

Farmacriticxs is a citizen lead platform, promoted and initiated by medical students born from the needs of a critical think toward physicians and health systems relation with pharma industries.
Being aware of the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, we work to express our concern, to promote ethics and transparency in relations with the Pharmaceutical Industry and to fight for a different and fair reality.
The project is developed by local, national and online events since 2009. We train students, professionals and patients about the consequences of patents based market, research target to economical goals, etc. and how can we fight it.

Focus area:

Ethical research and ethical financing

Problem statement:

The current situation in which the Pharmaceutical Industry operates impede the access to the right to health of millions of people worldwide, due to market based on patents. It has become therefore a powerful risk and threat to Public Health. Also research is geared towards market value. Farmacriticxs is a citizen lead platform, promoted by medical students as a reaction to our exposition and increasing influence of Big Pharma in our Universities, Hospitals and in the life of Physicians.

Target groups and beneficiaries:

Students: They are our main goal for outreach. They tend to be presented with health-industries at early stages of their degrees in events such as conferences, workshops and advertising and we firmly believe that they need to have the tools to reflect critically about these industries and think outside the box
Professionals: are the main target of the pharmaceutical industries. We aim to bring some debates alive and aware them about this problem
Patients: we encourage them to become more sceptical

Objectives and indicators of success:

1. Bringing up debates to analyse the pharmaceutical industry in our health system, in our training and towards the improvement of global health. This is achieved by local meetings, national conferences, and mainly by online debate
2. Making students, health professionals, and general population aware of the importance of the current issues related to the manufacturing, promotion and use of medicines. This is achieved by the publishing of our manifestos, sharing information on social networks and in all our activities as NMO
3. Defending the concepts of ethics and transparency as essential elements in pharmaceutical industry
4. Supporting non interest-related forms of training and research

Methodology:

Local and national events, with peer trainings and sessions. This is one of the main agents of spreading the information, by promoting workshops, speeches and presentations about the subject from our IFMSA locals to our fellow medical students. We also cover content systematically in our National GAs. Additionally, there is an annual nationwide specific meeting of Farmacriticxs
Online work, via email which deals with the project’s internal management and aims at keeping the debate going
Cooperation with other unions and associations to develop campaigns which go beyond health care and the medical field
The timeline is a cycle, where each event leads to the next and each steps feed every other

Plans for evaluation:

We value the number and active participation of Local Commitees attached to the project. Having many participants that also show implication is the best indicator we have to know if we are doing a good work
We consider the number of conferences/meetings during the year, number of assistants, quality and variety of contents, and quality and conclusions of the presentations we make. Providing good materials and preparing useful sessions is the basis for a quality training
We attach importance to diffusion, impact and publishing articles in the media, since it is what allows us to reach more people
We provide feedback questionnaires after each session, in order to know the assistants’ opinions