Branded care: Understanding the role of patient support programs in the care of people prescribed specialty medicines 

Branded care: Understanding the role of patient support programs in the care of people prescribed specialty medicines   

Specialty medicines account for an increasing share of total pharmaceutical sales in Canada and have dominated public and private drug spending. To facilitate access and adherence to these high-cost drugs, companies now routinely offer wrap-around patient support programs free of charge to any patient prescribed their drug. Drawing on over 40 in-depth interviews with patients, industry employees, pharmacists, nurses, prescribers, and policymakers, Quinn will discuss the phenomenon of ‘branded care’ in the context of the Canadian health system and what it means when pharmaceutical companies take on the funding and delivery of health services.  

Speaker: Quinn Grundy

Quinn Grundy PhD RN is Assistant Professor with the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and cross-appointed to the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto. She leads a program of work analyzing the implications of pharmaceutical and medical device industry initiatives and strategies to promote access to and uptake of their products within health systems. She is Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Governance, Accountability, and Transparency in the Pharmaceutical Sector and author of Infiltrating Healthcare: How Marketing Works Underground to Influence Nurses (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).