Principles for the application and sponsorship of events
General medicine and palliative medicine have numerous points of contact with other specialist disciplines. The range of further training courses on offer is correspondingly diverse and large; this applies in particular to GP practices with their broad specialist spectrum. At the same time, the differentiated examination of issues relating to the sponsorship of training events in the context of conflicts of interest in medicine is becoming increasingly important (e.g. Lieb K et al. 2018*). Against this background, we at the Institute ofGeneral Medicine and Palliative Medicine have defined principles for our approach to events and sponsorship:
Application of events
Our Institute receives numerous references to events and studies with the request to publicize them to GPs. At the same time, we know that GPs receive considerable amounts of invitations and materials from many sources in their everyday practice. In order to keep the amount of information manageable for both the GP practices and our Institute, we can only apply for events that we organize ourselves or in which we are actively involved.
Sponsoring of events
The events for which we are responsible are based on the recommendations of the German Society for General Practice and Family Medicine.
Accordingly, we do not organize any events with sponsorship that could potentially influence the diagnostic and/or therapeutic procedure (e.g. sponsorship by companies in the pharmaceutical industry). Other forms of sponsorship (providers of health-related services that are not provided to patients or providers of non-medical services) are reviewed on an individual basis.