E-DRUG: Health Policy & Planning: Nationwide study India's private-sector vaccination (2)
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E-Druggers
I would like to comment on the paper which Abishek Sharma posted a message about on 16th March. The article is posted at
http://heapol.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/czw008ijkey=tTWcgoTYsOW1OMj&keytype=ref
Abhishek is a Boston University School of Public Health recent graduate so I am proud that he has been published in such a good journal. Warren Kaplan is a colleague in my department at Boston University. I did review an early draft of the paper but am not an author so I do not feel a conflict of interest in commenting.
What I particularly like about this paper is how they have combined IMS Health, Census and national Household survey data about children's vaccination status. All countries have census data, many have IMS Health data and there are many household surveys available. These may be DHS surveys, or household expenditure surveys or UNICEF surveys.
There is a perception that IMS Health data is very expensive to obtain and it is if you buy current data. But I have seen many occasions when IMS Health at country or Global Level will respond to a request for their data for a public health purpose. The data may not be current but for a study like this one you need older data to be able to combine it with other survey or census data that always takes a time to come out.
IMS data is generally not available for Sub Saharan Africa except for South Africa and francophone West African countries and is also not available for the small Pacific Island countries. But many countries do have the data and often it is not used for public health purposes. For more information about their resources see
http://www.imshealth.com/en/thought-leadership/ims-institute/reports
and the recent report on Global Medicines Use in 2020 at
http://www.imshealth.com/en/thought-leadership/ims-institute/reports/global-medicines-use-in-2020
So my question is how could this work be repeated looking at how the private sector could meet the unmet need for vaccinations, contraceptives and medicines? Often the unmet need may not primarily be poverty driven but can be affected by convenience. Often working people cannot take time off to wait in public sector facilities and would go to private sector facilities out of working hours if the services were offered.
So do please read the paper and comment further on it.
Richard Laing
Professor International Health
Boston University School of Public Health,
801 Massachusetts Avenue Boston MA 02118
Richard Laing <richardl@bu.edu>