ACCEPTANCE POLICY FOR MEDICAL EDUCATION GRANTS

The Kidney Cancer Association (KCA) is a charitable non-profit voluntary health organization dedicated to fighting kidney cancer. KCA's mission is three-fold: (1) educate patients, families and health professionals about kidney cancer and available treatments, (2) promote and fund research of the causes and treatments of kidney cancer, and (3) advocate on behalf of patient interests before federal and state governments and other institutions.  As a non­profit charitable organization, KCA relies entirely on grants and other contributions and donations to fund these activities. In serving its mission, KCA sponsors numerous education meetings for patients and their families and for physicians. KCA receives significant support for its physician education meetings from medical education grants from corporate sponsors.

In the past, KCA has used surplus funds from these physician education meetings to fund the other equally important aspects of its mission. However, many corporate sponsors recently have instituted new policies which require organizations receiving medical education grants for physician education meetings to return any surpluses.  As these surpluses are essential to KCA's ability to provide funding to support the services to people affected by kidney cancer, KCA has adopted the following policy regarding the acceptance of medical education grants:

KCA shall request medical education grants based on its good faith estimate of the direct and indirect costs associated with sponsoring physician education meeting for which the grants are being solicited, taking into account any other grants received or likely to be received for purposes of funding such meeting.

KCA shall retain any surplus from any medical education grant received and shall use such surplus solely to fund its charitable activities in accordance with applicable law and not for any illegal or unethical purpose.

KCA shall not return any surplus from a medical education grant to the donor; and

Upon a donor's request, KCA shall provide an accounting of the use of such donor's medical education grant, including the use of any surplus retained by KCA.

This policy shall apply to all medical education grants requested and received by KCA, and KCA may not accept any medical education grant from any donor if such grant is subject to any condition that would require KCA to violate this policy.