E-DRUG: Better drug and antibiotic use is associated with more policy implementation (3)
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I am very pleased that this paper has been published. To repeat the paper is at http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001724
This paper brings together two streams of work. The first initiated by INRUD and then continued by Kathy was the development of interventions to improve medicine use that were thoroughly evaluated. Kathy put together and maintained a data base that gathered these hundreds of studies in a way that the key elements could be extracted. A number of different people including Verica Ivanovska and others helped with this process.
The second stream was the work done by WHO in developing pharmaceutical country profiles. Many people in many different countries contributed to these profiles most of which are published on the WHO web site at http://www.who.int/medicines/areas/coordination/coordination_assessment/en/index1.html . The outcome of all this work came together in this paper.
The key take home message from the paper is that creating an enabling environment through policies, structures and implementation activities does improve the use of medicines as an outcome. But the paper also creates a question. When countries spend so much on medicines (30-40% of total Health expenditure) why then do they spend so little and expend such limited human resources on improving the use of these medicines? If just 1% of medicines budget was spent on improving the use of medicines the outcomes would be dramatic as this paper shows.
Kathy in her new position as the regional adviser in SEARO working in the 11 countries of that region has tried to move this process forward by doing country assessments with implementation plans. These are all discussed on their regional web site at http://www.searo.who.int/entity/medicines/en/ with their country situational analysis reports at http://www.searo.who.int/entity/medicines/country_situational_analysis/en/ . Well worth a look.
So congratulations to Kathy and David. This is a most important paper that will be cited for years to come. I just hope we do not need to wait 25 years before it is updated.
Richard
Richard Laing
Professor International Health
Boston University School of Public Health,
801 Massachusetts Avenue Boston MA 02118
Tel 617 414 1445 (Office) 617 435 7860 (Mobile)
http://www.bu.edu/pharm/the-program/
E mail richardl@bu.edu