International Continence Society

Prof Clare Juliet Fowler is Consultant in Uro-Neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery and Professor of Uro-Neurology at Institute of Neurology, UCL.
She sees many patients with neurological causes of bladder or sexual dysfunction and has developed a special interest in urinary retention in women. Over many years of research she has had considerable interaction with the pharmaceutical industry and has good reason to understand the EU regulations governing clinical research, which came into force in 2004.

Mission statement "It appears to me that risks of conflicts of interest have been at the heart of many of ICS’s recent difficulties. My intention would be to build on the very significant achievements of Lewis Wall who established and lead our first Ethics Committee and who has now got us in the position of “viewable disclosures”, posted on the website. We need to try and develop means by which our commercial links are managed in a truly transparent manner – disclosure alone is not enough - the mutual dependence of healthcare professionals and industry is a widespread phenomenon in medicine today. No perfect way of dealing with this has yet been discovered but I would suggest we seek out best practices and learn from those so that we can in future, focus our discussions on scientific debate."