[Nursing and industry relations: literature review and conflicts of interest survey].

Background: Advanced competencies and tasks of nurses go along with an increasing interest of pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers in nurses as a marketing target.

Objective: To identify nurses' attitudes, perceptions and behavior regarding industry and marketing strategies.

Methods: 1) Systematic literature search in Medline via PubMed and CINAHL for international studies on nurses' conflict of interests towards pharmaceutical companies; 2) analysis of a survey with PhD students from two Nursing Science doctoral programs.

Results: The review including 16 publications published between 1999 and 2014 and the survey among 82 PhD students revealed comparable results. The majority of nurses already had contact with pharmaceutical companies. Nurses are often uncritical in their attitudes, and suggestibility is claimed to be low. The majority of nurses were not - or at least not sufficiently - provided with conflict of interest training, neither as part of their vocational training nor their continuing education.

Conclusion: Conflict of interest seems to be an important topic for nurses. Increasing relevance in the future underpins the need for making nurses more sensitive towards this issue, especially through professional training programs.