Pharmaceutical companies should make all their payments to doctors and medical researchers public, health minister Ab Klink says in Monday’s Trouw.

‘There must be an open book. It is in everyone’s interest,’ Klink said in an interview with the paper. ‘Transparency offers pharmaceutical companies the opportunity to show they are not using dodgy practices.’
The minister said he would prefer to introduce more transparency by law but would consider a voluntary agreement.
In particular, transparency is in the interests of science, he told Trouw. ‘You can then identify which interests have been involved in research. There is nothing against working with pharmaceutical companies in researching the effects and side effects of medicine.’
Klink also called for the setting up of an independent fund to back research into drugs which are not commercially interesting. All pharmaceutical firms should put a proportion of their marketing budgets into such a fund, he told the paper.