EUnetHTA Adaptation Glossary (beta)

Conflict of Interest
There has been a little arguing about what “Conflito de interesses” in Portuguese really means. We used to refer this to when a person or a group had a particular (economic or professional) interest in a task or product, and was being part of a party designated to assess the utility of this product. But its range can be wider, especially when we are speaking of health professionals, who should have different scopes for the same path: for instance physicians should use the patient perspective in some aspects of health, but should also take into account the Ministry of Health perspective or the Medical Society perspective in others, not to think of his own personal perspective. Therefore we now tend to consider “conflict of interest” as the personal perspective against the party or group perspective, as the most important “Conflict” of all the interests in stake.

Competing Interests
Competing interests add a temporal vector to the possible conflicting interests. However, competing interests may not be conflicting. Sometimes they compete for the same window of opportunity. Therefore, the success of one project (one interest) may jeopardize the success of the other. Sometimes the interests can be conflicting, e.g. “The interests of the population go against the interests of the Army, competing for the ownership of the land on the east side of the river”.