E-drug: Improving access to psychotropic drugs
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Dear E-druggers,
Let me start by wishing all of you a very happy and successful
2002!
As many of you may know, the World Health Organization
increased its attention to mental health disorders, and the focus of
the World Health Report 2001 has been on mental illness and
neurological disease. WHO emphasised that affordable treatments
exist for many conditions, but that they are not being applied for a
variety of reasons. Many countries lack even the most basic care
and treatment. To address this situation WHO started a number of
initiatives, one of them being the preparation of a guidance package
on mental health policy and service delivery in developing countries.
I have been asked to draft a module in this series on Improving
Access to Essential Psychotropic Drugs, which would target health
policy makers and service planners.
The module is expected to cover all issues relevant to access to
mental health related (psychotropic) drugs, e.g. policy environment,
selection, quantification, procurement, distribution, appropriate use,
as well as financing and safeguarding quality and safety of this
class of drugs.
Clearly, these subjects are covered to a large extent by the regular
essential drugs literature, and we will make use of it wherever
possible. Some issues may be more specific to mental health and
we are now trying to make an inventory of available literature on
drug management in mental health and neurological disease. A
general literature search (Medline) has been disappointing, as there
is not that much published literature. However, I am sure that
various people in the developing world have thought about how to
improve availability and access to mental health related drugs, tried
out innovative approaches, and that there are valuable experiences
out there. I suspect that many of these experiences are buried in
project reports and did not get published in the regular literature.
Another issue is that we want to include examples of best practice
in improving access to mental health related drugs. We think of
projects that have given specific thought on what are key access
problems, what can be done to improve them, and which strategies
are needed to improve access and use. We do have some
examples, but we would like to have more.
I wonder whether E-druggers can help me to identify literature. This
may be both published and not-published literature and/or project
documents. Any electronic, faxed or snail-mailed document is much
appreciated, but also literature references are welcome. Should you
know of individuals or organisations who have gained specific
research or project experience in these fields, I would very much
appreciate your help in contacting them.
As usual, please send your response to me, and not to E-drug.
Thanks for your help,
Hilbrand Haak
Consultants for Health and Development
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Sleedoorntuin 7 tel: +31-71-523.2052
2317 MV Leiden fax: +31-71-523.3592
The Netherlands e-mail: haakh@chd-consultants.nl
Visit CHD's website at www.chd-consultants.nl
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