health care professionals

Many political decisions within the health system are critical depending on the number of patients affected by a particular disease group and hence which discipline of medicine is responsible for the care of these patients. This applies for budgets for health care, number of beds for a particular disease group, overall budget for a discipline within a hospital, budgets for out- or inpatients care, but also percentage of research money which goes into particular fields of medical research. Also, the general public counts on these measures because mortality, morbidity and costs of disease are important to determine the importance of a disease group and usually, the higher the numbers the more important is the disease.

Conflicts of interest (COI) in biomedical research are a matter of increasing interest, concern and debate and have led particularly over the last 10 years to a number of studies to analyse the problem and recommendations to avoid it. One of the last and most prominent recommendations is that of the Institute of Medicine in the US, in which COI were defined as follows: “a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest” (1).