Steve Gray answers your questions about compliance with the ABPI Code of Business Practice and other industry codes that govern commercial activity.
Part one: Meeting venues
Dear Steve,
I have been using the local Indian restaurant for many years to run educational meetings with consultants and nurses in my local hospital trust. The service is great and I get a very good discount. I am worried that the introduction of the ABHI Code of Business Practice will force me to use a different venue. Do I have to change where I hold my meetings?
Steve says:
The short answer is that you are probably OK. That assumes we are talking about a reasonable quality curry-house, not a gourmet restaurant that charges £30 for its celebrated Goan river prawn curry.
The ABHI Code of Business Practice defines acceptable standards for the manner in which meetings are run and where they take place. In essence, it is OK to provide a meal when your meeting takes place at a typical mealtime, but it is not OK to use the meal or the venue as an incentive for the audience. In other words, the educational content of the meeting is far more important than where or what the delegates eat. The food is just there to ensure they do not have to miss a meal in order to attend your meeting.
It is expected that the location of your presentation should be somewhere sensible, not somewhere that would cause a tabloid newspaper to perk up and show interest. So you can hold a meeting in the private room of a local restaurant that has suitable facilities for a presentation to a small group. That will mean it is reasonably easy for the delegates to access the venue, that they can be comfortably seated and see the screen, and that the meeting takes place away from the general public. If the meeting is taking place at a mealtime, it makes sense for the venue you choose to be able to provide a meal.
However, it would be inappropriate for you to select a venue because it is owned by a nationally famous chef or is renowned for providing the very highest standards of cuisine. This is because people aren’t coming to the meeting because of the food: they are coming because of the education. The food must be of secondary importance. A good litmus test for this is the price of a meal. No-one is suggesting that you take people to McDonalds, and the food should be acceptable to the delegates – but if the cost of the meal could be seen as excessive, that might indicate that you were using the food as an incentive for people to attend the meeting, which would be inappropriate.
So it makes sense to avoid high-profile venues (restaurants with two AA rosettes, 5-star hotels, high-priced menus etc) so there can be no misunderstanding regarding the primary driver for the event: the clinical and product information.
A good rule of thumb when arranging meetings such as this is to ask yourself what it would look like to an independent observer looking through the window. If you were to think that a genuine presentation was going on and a reasonable meal or buffet was available at the time, you wouldn’t really think twice about it. However, if you felt there were a lot of people in the room having a lot of expensive fun and frivolity, without trying to work, you would think twice. Think what you would be noticing if you worked for the tabloid newspaper I mentioned earlier!
It is also worthwhile considering the level of alcohol consumed after such a meeting. That may seem an obvious point, but it can make all the difference in terms of the window test. Keep consumption to a sensible level and avoid excess, and the level of risk will be reduced accordingly.
Steve Gray is an experienced compliance specialist. His company produces a range of training materials, workbooks and distance learning courses designed specifically for companies and sales teams working with the ABHI Code of Business Practice. For more details, visit www.stevengrayconsulting.co.uk.
