Unlocking Essential Medicines Lists

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Nov 12, 2012
by Felipe Estefan
Unlocking Essential Medicines Lists

Experiences from Australia & GSK

GSK’s Strahlman explains the role pharma’ companies can play in right to health The realization of the right to health requires collaboration, across regions and across sectors, in which a wide set of actors engage to produce much-needed positive transformations.The need for collaborative, multi-stakeholder approaches is one of the key points that has emerged during the global symposium on  “Realizing the Right to Health”, hosted by the Salzburg Global Seminar, the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Science Deliver, and the World Bank Institute. In a conversation moderated by the World Bank Institute’s Leonardo Cubillos, panelists Lloyd Sansom, special advisor on the National Medicines Policy Framework at the Australian Department of Health, and Ellen Strahlman, senior vice president for GlaxoSmithKline, highlighted the importance and the willingness to engage in a collaborative approach to the realization of the right to health. We have to “unlock” the potential for us to be partners in order “to make sure that health care is delivered,” stated Strahlman. She explained the potential for civil society to work together with pharmaceutical companies in ensuring that citizens have access to medicines, and that the right to health is realized for all. Strahlman discussed the shared nature of the objectives of those working  in pharmaceutical companies, like GlaxoSmithKline, and of those working elsewhere trying to advance the right to health from different sectors. Ultimately, “the people who go to work in these [pharmaceutical] industries… their mental map is to deliver medicines,” she said. Furthermore, Strahlman explained why the timing is right for multi-stakeholder intervention. “There has never been a better time,” she told participants. The medicines are there, the technology is there, the communications tools are there, to ensure that the right to health can be realized. Sharing the experience from the Australian case, Lloyd Sansom also stressed the importance of a collaborative approach and suggested that the realization of the right to health “represents a new paradigm” and as such it requires for a wide range of actors, from all around the world to “do this as a collective.”One of the areas in which the realization of the right to health can lead to great progress is on the development of essential medicines lists in countries.  The issue of an essential medicines list is one directly linked to the impact that access to medicines has on the everday lives of citizens around the world. Sansom argues that the creation of such a list in a country must regard the social value of a particular medicine, by having citizens be active participants in an honest assesment of how having or not having access to a medicine in order to treat a particular condition may affect the way in which the patients, their families and their caretakers have to deal with such condition. More so, from a global perspective, this issue is one connected directly to development and to the notion of fairness. “Why is the accessibility, which includes availability and affordability so low in the developing world?...Why is accessibility so poor and affordability so variable, even within a country?” asked Sansom. Sansom encouraged participants to collaborate on how to “increase the cooperation and improve the efficiency” of health systems applying a rights-based approach.
 Collaboration around a common understanding of health from a rights-based perspective, can lead to important progress in the realization of the right to health and the strengthening of health systems around the world.