Abstract
When people are ill, the most common action they take is to use a medicine. Therefore, ensuring that people have access to safe, effective, and high-quality medicines is fundamental to improving health outcomes. Providing this access at a cost which is affordable to the individual consumer and the wider community is a global challenge. This chapter discusses the need to measure access to medicines and describes policy options for promoting access to medicines at different levels of the health system. We go on to discuss the need for evidence to support policy decision-making, and describe the data sources and methods which can be used to generate this evidence. We conclude by highlighting the importance of ongoing and integrated evidence generation with policy decision-making to measure the intended and unintended consequences of policy over time.
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Roughead, E.E., Kemp-Casey, A. (2023). Evidence Generation on Access to Medicines by Patients. In: Encyclopedia of Evidence in Pharmaceutical Public Health and Health Services Research in Pharmacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50247-8_134-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50247-8_134-1
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