[e-drug] Access to Medicines in Southern Africa

e-drug
1

E-DRUG: Access to Medicines in Southern Africa
---------------------------------------
[The availability of essential medicines also depends on good management including appropriate use, record keeping, quantification and forecasting for efficient procurement, distribution and stock maintenance. Moderator ]

Dear E-Druggers

I am involved in the Southern African Regional Programme on Access to
Medicines (SARPAM) which has the overall goal of reducing the disease
burden in Southern Africa by increasing access to affordable essential
medicines. The programme's purpose is to strengthen the capacity
across the SADC region in order to improve the availability,
affordability and quality of essential medicines and diagnostics.

As one of the outputs of this programme, we are planning the
development of an Information Hub which will provide open access to
medicine pricing data, as well as information relating to medicine
regulation, availability and affordability. We hope to utilise data
from existing databases as well as data gathered within the context of
SARPAM. We are looking for suggestions as to what information needs
currently exist in order to further our aim of alleviating the
information assymmetries that exist within this region.

Our target audience is all stakeholders involved in the pharmaceutical
supply chain including, manufacturers, procurement agencies,
regulators, policy makers, researchers and end consumers. We would be
very happy to receive suggestions from this mailing list's members,
regarding potential information needs within the region, available
data sources or interested parties.

Many thanks

Adi Eyal
Data Manager: SARPAM
tel: +27 21 685 1846
mobile: +27 78 014 2469
skype: adieyalcas
Adi Eyal <adi@sarpam.net>

2

E-DRUG: Access to Medicines in Southern Africa (2)
------------------------------------------

For Countries that are challenged in terms of Human Resource to effectively
determine the quality of the Pharmaceutical Sources in Asia, which are very
competitive in terms of pricing, it will be very good if we can have a data
base of the registration status of the products from the Suppliers in Asia
for distribution within the Sadc Countries. So that when we issue out our tender documents we
can just indicate as an eligibility criteria that the product must be on the
"SADC Pre-qualified List of Essential Medicines".

I am talking of something more or less similar to WHO-Prequalification Project for HIV/AIDs products.
Secondly, information sharing Hub will be very Essential especially in the
areas of BAD PRACTICEs so that if Supplier A defaults in of the SADC Member
Country, that Supplier A should know that chances of getting "ACTION" from
all the SADC countries is there.

MR Sefali
General Manager of NDSO
Lesotho
"Sefali" <gm@ndso.org.ls>