If your health practitioner has used a syringe, tongue depressor (to look at your throat), pacemaker, stethoscope, X-ray or MRI scan, blood test, dental filling or joint implant to treat you, you’ve encountered a product from the medical technology industry.
That industry is diverse, ranging from high-tech patent-rich global corporations to small businesses that operate only in Australia. It is claimed to employ more than 19,000 people in Australia and have a turnover of around A$12 billion in 2012/13. Operating margins have been around 25%.
Many of the businesses are represented by the Medical Technology Association of Australia (MTAA). This industry body is for manufacturers of products regulated by the Commonwealth government. Use of those products is typically funded wholly or in part by the taxpayer. There are strict requirements around their certification, import and sale.
MTAA members include Johnson & Johnson Medical, 3M Healthcare and Medtronic Australasia.
The MTAA is quietly influential. Quiet because its activity as an industry advocacy body is often only known to policymakers and specialists. Quiet because it has not sought to capture the mass media.
It’s influential because it persuaded the government, in responding earlier this month to the Review of Medicines and Medical Devices Regulation (aka Sansom Review), to reject the recommendation to establish mandatory registries for use of high-risk implantable devices such as hip joints.
Those registries would be overseen by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the industry-funded national drugs and devices regulator.
The MTAA explained its opposition to the registries as a cost concern for industry and an inhibitor of innovation, claiming that establishment and maintenance of the registries would be extremely expensive.
We need to be wary of such advocacy. Some of the businesses are large and profitable. Some have faced law suits for selling defective devices.
DePuy International, a subsidiary of global giant Johnson & Johnson, for example, sold faulty joint implants. This resulted in harm to individuals and to the national economy through hospitalisation for remedial surgery and loss of productivity. These harms were not fully addressed through billion-dollar class actions in Australia and overseas.
The Sansom Review had accordingly recommended that data in the registries would be used for an active program to analyse and report on problems with devices.
Sansom also recommended the TGA actively share registry and other monitoring data with overseas medical device regulators. Transparency in what’s going wrong is a foundation for health practice. It would offset the TGA’s past weaknesses in this area.
MTAA priorities
MTAA spending on advocacy – whether through representations to MPs, briefings of journalists, submissions to inquiries such as the Harper Review on competition policy, or membership of official working groups – is not publicly available.