A Royal College of Physicians working party has endorsed AMRC’s An Essential Partnership: Principles and Guidelines for Working with Industry in a report published this month.

Their report, Innovating for health: Patients, physicians, the pharmaceutical industry and the NHS is the result of a cross-sector working party brought together by the College to look at the relationship between the NHS, academic medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, and identify policies that would encourage a dynamic, productive and sustainable relationship between all parties.

In An Essential Partnership AMRC encourages greater openness and transparency between charities and industry and sets out our view that such relationships should be based on independence, integrity and openness – principles supported and endorsed in the working party report.

On the theme of encouraging innovation in research, the report recommends that:

“The Medical Research Council (MRC), NIHR, Wellcome Trust, Association of Medical Research Charities, and universities, together with the ABPI, should investigate the UK skills base for translational medicine with a view to devising and implementing policies to redress existing or projected skills gaps.”

Commenting on the report’s publication, Simon Denegri, AMRC Chief Executive said:

“I am delighted that the Royal College of Physicians’ working party has given such a strong endorsement of the principles and guidelines AMRC laid out in An Essential Partnership.  Later this year we will be holding a workshop with member charities and others to discuss how we can ensure research charities are embedding these principles in their day to day policies and practice.”

Further information about the report is available at: www.rcplondon.ac.uk.