Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing

A $25-million gift from Myron and Berna Garron will contribute significantly to the construction of a new state-of-the-art facility at University of Toronto Scarborough that will house the Scarborough Academy of Medicine and Integrated Health (SAMIH). The gift will also support programming and faculty development – in collaboration with hospital partners such as Scarborough Health Network and Michael Garron Hospital – helping to ensure that SAMIH learners have access to a world-class education right in Scarborough and the Eastern GTA.

The University of Toronto will name the new building the Myron and Berna Garron Health Sciences Complex, in honour of the Garrons’ exceptional generosity.

“Myron and Berna Garron’s extraordinary benefaction will help us to realize our vision for the Scarborough Academy of Medicine and Integrated Health – to educate health-care professionals from the region, in the region and for the region,” said Meric Gertler, president of ��ֱ��. “On behalf of the University of Toronto, I thank them for their leadership in the advancement of this crucial mission.”

Helping to revitalize the health-care landscape

SAMIH, the first hub for educating health professionals in Scarborough and the Eastern GTA and the only medical school in the region, was established to address the critical shortage of family physicians and specialists in the fast-growing area by training health providers who reflect the community. The training will take place in partnership with local hospitals, primary care centres and community agencies.

Once the program is fully up and running, SAMIH will have 160 medical students and a combined total of 252 physician assistants, physical therapists and nurse practitioners enrolled. Three top-ranked ��ֱ�� faculties – the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy – will expand educational programming to this hub. These students will be based at the new Myron and Berna Garron Health Sciences Complex, which will also serve as a base for ��ֱ�� Scarborough undergraduates studying health sciences.

The Myron and Berna Garron Health Sciences Complex, currently under construction, will feature an anatomy lab for medical students, two large classrooms equipped with state-of-the-art technology, a 25-bed clinical skills lab and 10 instructional labs. To provide hands-on learning and serve the community directly, the facility will house three teaching clinics offering public services: a clinical psychology clinic, a nurse practitioner clinic and a satellite of ��ֱ��’s Discovery Pharmacy.

SAMIH medical trainees will undertake clinical rotations at several area hospitals, including Scarborough Health Network, Lakeridge Health, Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences and Michael Garron Hospital – named in memory of Myron and Berna Garron’s late son, who was born there and later died of cancer at the age of 13. The Garrons’ $50-million donation in 2015 to what was then Toronto East General Hospital has resulted in remarkable benefits for people in the region.

"We envision SAMIH as closing the circle on providing for total patient care, from educating professionals to delivering care bedside,” said Myron and Berna Garron. “In an era of extensive shortages of vital health practitioners, we are proud to help fill this educational and training gap, especially for the underserved area of Scarborough and the Eastern GTA."

SAMIH is expected to provide numerous benefits for the area. By increasing the number of health providers who will have received ��ֱ��’s top-tier education, SAMIH will help improve access and care for patients who live in the region, extend the availability of various health-care services via its public clinics, provide opportunities for local students from diverse backgrounds to consider becoming a health professional and increase the likelihood of health professionals trained in Scarborough to practice locally.

Furthermore, the partnerships with Scarborough Health Network and Michael Garron Hospital will strengthen research and teaching links between the university and the hospitals.

“This generous investment from Myron and Berna Garron is a commitment to the future of health care; through their support of SAMIH and their partnership with Michael Garron Hospital, they’re enabling knowledge creation and sharing that will benefit our communities locally and more broadly,” said Melanie Kohn, president and CEO of Michael Garron Hospital. “The Garrons’ gift to our hospital will establish our first chair in education, in partnership with the University of Toronto, which will advance our ability to train tomorrow’s outstanding health-care leaders.”

A community of support

SAMIH was made possible by the Government of Ontario’s commitment to fund the expansion of medical education as part of its strategy to address the critical shortage of health professionals in the province.

“On behalf of Premier Doug Ford and our government, I want to thank Myron and Berna Garron for their generous donation to the Scarborough Academy of Medicine and Integrated Health,” said Sylvia Jones, Ontario’s deputy premier and minister of health. “Your support builds on the largest expansion of medical education that our government has undertaken in 15 years, training more doctors in the GTA than ever before to ensure people can access care in their communities for years to come.”

In a further boost for funding the building’s construction, Myron and Berna Garron’s donation triggers $10 million in matching funds from a $25-million gift to SAMIH from Orlando Corporation in 2022.

The five-storey, purpose-built Myron and Berna Garron Health Sciences Complex is located at U of T Scarborough at the intersection of Military Trail and Morningside Avenue, across from the Toronto Pan Am Centre, and is expected to open in the fall of 2026.

“This gift speaks to Myron and Berna Garron’s appreciation of how health-care education enables healthy lives – a key priority of Defy Gravity: The Campaign for the University of Toronto,” said David Palmer, vice-president of advancement at ��ֱ��. “We are deeply grateful for this generous donation and the impact it will have on the health of those in Scarborough and the Eastern GTA. The Garron family’s generosity exemplifies how philanthropy can help address inequities and help shape the future of health care in our communities.”

��ֱ�� leaders react

“As home to the Scarborough Academy of Medicine and Integrated Health, the University of Toronto Scarborough is delighted for this opportunity to increase our impact on the community. SAMIH will attract a diverse pool of local talent and afford graduates the ability to establish their careers in Scarborough and the Eastern GTA – an asset for students with personal ties to the region and for a population in great need of more accessible health care.”

—Linda Johnston, ��ֱ�� vice-president and principal of ��ֱ�� Scarborough

“Building a new health sciences complex to house this region’s first medical academy is a historic undertaking. Creating an academy that is advancing health equity as a key priority is even more exceptional. This is a unique opportunity for Temerty Faculty of Medicine to expand the reach of our world-class programs, innovate teaching models and play a critical role in a pipeline that will infuse the health-care system with a steady stream of much-needed physicians and other health-care professionals.”

—Lisa Robinson, dean, Temerty Faculty of Medicine and vice-provost, relations with health-care institutions

“Thanks to the Garrons’ substantial support of the new Myron and Berna Garron Health Sciences Complex, students from the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing will have the opportunity to advance their nursing expertise in a clinic that is embedded within the community. This unique interprofessional environment will ensure graduates of our nurse practitioner program are well-equipped to meet the urgent need for primary health care in the region.”

—Robyn Stremler, dean, Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing

“We’re thrilled that ��ֱ�� pharmacy students will train on rotation at the Discovery Pharmacy within the new Myron and Berna Garron Health Sciences Complex. This additional location offering clinical training in an interdisciplinary setting will be a boon to the profession, given how the scope of practice for pharmacists continues to expand and evolve to better support the people and communities we serve.”

—Lisa Dolovich, dean, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Pharma companies sponsored over a million events for U.S. health professionals in a single year: Study

rahul.kalvapalle — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 17:01:47 +0000

Pharma companies sponsored over a million events for U.S. health professionals in a single year: Study

rahul.kalvapalle Thu, 07/18/2024 - 13:01

Cutline

(photo by fluxfoto/Getty Images)

Rebecca Biason

Topic

Breaking Research

Research and Innovation

Subheadline

A new study from ��ֱ��’s Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing examines the scale of industry-sponsored events targeting health professionals

Research led by the University of Toronto’s Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing is shedding light on the scale of pharmaceutical industry-sponsored events that target health professionals responsible for prescribing medications.

Promotional events attended by prescribers such as physicians and nurse practitioners are a key component of marketing campaigns for new drugs and devices. But there is little transparency around their scope and extent.

In a bid to increase transparency on industry-prescriber interactions, researchers led by Assistant Professor Quinn Grundy examined data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Open Payments, a public database of payments made by drug and medical device companies to medical professionals.

Their study, published in JAMA Health Forum, found that there were over 1.1 million industry-sponsored events in the U.S., one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical markets, in 2022 alone. The top 10 products – based on number of sponsored dinner events – were the focus of over 16,000 dinners sponsored by seven companies.

“Identifying over one million of these events in one year alone – and their tendency to be for specific products – should give us pause and indicate that we need to understand the prevalence of these events from a systems perspective, considering their impact on prescribing practices,” says Grundy, who is also the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre in Governance, Accountability, and Transparency in the Pharmaceutical Sector.

Grundy notes that there is already a large body of evidence on the relationship between payments and physician prescribing outcomes. Receipt of industry payments, including low-value payments for food and beverage, is often associated with physicians prescribing higher quantities of promoted and higher-cost drugs, such as brand name drugs over generics.

The Open Payments database was established under the Affordable Care Act in 2012 in the hopes of creating greater transparency around the relationships between clinicians and the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.

Using the database, researchers were able to examine records of payments from pharmaceutical and device companies to clinicians for food and beverage and to link these across matching variables to identify – and quantify – in-person sponsored events for specific products. Excluding conferences and virtual events, the numbers indicated that these industry-sponsored events were quite widespread, across various states.

What this shows, Grundy says, is that while individual health professionals may only attend a few of these events, pharmaceutical companies are sponsoring hundreds of them nationwide.

“When you think of the number of events and the number of health professionals attending these events, what emerges is a picture of a campaign that is able, at a national scale, to amplify perspectives about a promoted drug that are likely favourable to the sponsor,” says Grundy.

The study did not reveal a particular pattern in terms of the types of products that were more likely to be promoted using industry sponsored events. However, there was evidence that two of the top 10 products, both mental health-oriented drugs, had more events for nurse practitioners than physicians, indicating their importance as prescribers in the pharmaceutical market.

In 2021, the first data on industry payments to prescribing nurses was released in the U.S. Grundy says this was an important and positive step towards transparency (Canada lags behind in this regard: there is currently no data or mechanism that requires pharmaceutical or device companies to report payments to physicians or nurse practitioners).

This study, funded by the Greenwall Foundation’s Making a Difference Grants program, is part of a multi-phase project that aims to analyze the new data on industry payments to advanced practice nurses in the U.S.

Grundy says she hopes the research “sparks some conversations in professional circles about how to interact with industry in ways that are in the best interests of population health” – and leads to more research on best practices in prescribing.

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Nursing, Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of

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Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing

����ֱ�� receives $25-million gift from Myron and Berna Garron for Scarborough Academy of Medicine and Integrated Health

Helping to revitalize the health-care landscape

A community of support

����ֱ�� leaders react

Pharma companies sponsored over a million events for U.S. health professionals in a single year: Study

Nursing, Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of

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��ֱ�� receives $25-million gift from Myron and Berna Garron for Scarborough Academy of Medicine and Integrated Health

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