Section Introduction

As we have previously identified, the pharmaceutical industry and international organisations clearly have a major role to play in ensuring more individuals have access to essential medicines. However, it would be unjust to lay the responsibility solely at their door, for many other key factors at a domestic level must also be taken into account. Supply systems within a country, from procuring the drug to it arriving in a patient's hand, are affected by many things.

A supply system has many aspects and involves the interaction of many actors: procurement, storage, distribution, health systems, transport networks, the government, private companies and NGOs.  In many developing countries face a public-private dilemma. The inefficient public supply systems meant for an entire country and the private systems servicing mostly urban areas leaves a larger, poorer rural population without access to the medication that they desperately need.2  Improved access to essential medicines requires all these areas to work well and calls for a ‘public-private-NGO’ collaboration.

The WHO has developed a four-part framework, identifying four areas which impact AEM and which aim to aid and coordinate improvements in access to essential medicines. This section will focus on how domestic supply chains for essential medicines can be greatly impacted by these four factors and other related issues, which include:

•    Rational selection and use of essential medicines

•    Affordable Prices

•    Sustainable Financing

•    Counter-fit and Sub-standard drugs

•    The ‘brain drain’ and health systems

•    Transport, storage and distribution of essential medicines

Modules in this section:

Getting the Right Drugs to the Right People