SGO Ethics Series: Updates to the SGO Conflict of Interest Policy | Nefertiti du Pont, MD, MPH

Nefertiti du Pont, MD, MPH

The SGO Ethics Committee was created in 2018 during the presidency of Carol Brown, MD. Dr. Brown understood the importance of having an ethics committee and appointed several members to serve as the inaugural committee. Our first order of business was to create policy and a framework for the new committee. All of our policies can be found on the SGO website under the About SGO tab under Ethics.

Our first chair was Monique Spillman, MD, PhD, who was a long-time member of the American Medical Association’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA). Dr. Spillman became chair of CEJA in 2020. Many of our past and current committee members have served on ACOG’s Ethics Committee and their local hospital ethics committee. While we are one of SGO’s newest committees, we continue to work hard on behalf of SGO. If you have an ethics question or concern, please contact me or our staff liaison, Traci Schwendner.

In this blog, I am going to highlight a few of the important changes the committee made to its Conflict of Interest Disclosure and Dissociation Policy (COI). Ronald Alvarez, MD, MBA, past SGO president, volunteered to serve as the subcommittee chair for this revision of the COI policy and I thank him for his time and valuable expertise. Drs. Alvarez and Richard Barakat are the original authors of the COI policy. The updated COI policy was approved by the SGO Board of Directors in November 2023.

Important Updates:

Committee members no longer have a financial restriction

• We did not want to limit participation in any SGO committee due to the financial restrictions listed in the COI policy. We removed the requirement that members abide by the financial limit of $25,000 and applied this financial restriction only to committee and taskforce chairs. The financial limit for committee and taskforce chairs was raised to $50,000 annually.

SGO Committee Chairs and Taskforce Chairs, Program Committee Chairs, Executive Committee Members, and members of the SGO Board of Directors are limited during their term of office to consulting fees, honorarium, or royalties in excess of $50,000.

• The original financial limit was $25,000 per year and after extensive discussion with a liaison group of leaders from NRG Oncology, we decided to increase the financial amount to $50,000 per year. We understand the issues facing our clinical trialists, but we wanted to maintain transparency as an organization, and we wanted to limit the influence of outside entities on the actions of our senior SGO leaders. We believe that leadership in SGO is a privilege and the committee felt that our financial relationships with industry do influence our decisions despite our best efforts to remain unbiased (Professional Relationships with Industry).

Senior volunteer leaders of the society may participate in scientific research, including serving as a clinical trial or grant investigator and they may serve as a member of a clinical trial steering committee or data safety monitoring board

• In this section of the COI policy, we wanted to highlight the importance of clinical research. We are grateful that many of our senior leaders are also leaders in the field of gynecologic oncology and we wanted to clarify that many of the research activities that make us unique as gynecologic oncologists should not be a barrier to holding senior leadership positions in our society.

The president of the society may participate in advisory boards but may not accept personal compensation, but reimbursement of travel expenses is allowed

• We wanted to clarify the issue of serving on advisory boards for our current president in this revised policy. We understand the importance of advisory boards and we clarified the policy to allow participation for our president since many of our senior SGO leaders are also leaders in clinical and basic science research. Reasonable travel expenses are allowed but personal compensation is not allowed.

I have highlighted many of the most important changes to the current COI policy. Please contact any of the Ethics committee members if you have a question or concern. Remember, these policies are reviewed and revised every three years.

Nefertiti duPont, MD, MPH is the SGO Ethics Committee Chair and a gynecologic oncologist and owner/CEO of North Houston Gynecologic Oncology Surgeons in Shenandoah, Texas.