Abstracts
Background
In the past decades, economic sanctions imposed on Iran for its nuclear program. The embargo made difficulty in foreign trade and led to lack of timely access to medicines. As the internationally-led sanctions caused to the shortage of medicine there, healthcare systems need to applied the new policies for maintaining health service quality especially in pharmaceutical sector.
Objectives
This paper is about policies applied in Iran health system during the crisis reached its peak in 2012 as a good experience for guarantying access to pharmaceutical products.
Methods
Through interviewing experts and managers in pharmaceutical regulatory system, the implemented policies in targeted historical period were extracted, then quantitative data were analyzed to show the impact of the policies on the access and affordability of medicines before and after their implementation in Iran food and drug administration (IFDA). This paper tries to show strategies employed by to tackle the crisis caused by sanctions and to offer practical policies to make medicines more accessible at the time of crisis.
Results
In order to reduce the harmful effects of this crisis, IFDA proposed some changes at different levels ranging from organizational procedures to parliament legislations. The main achievements of IFDA were making drugs easily available are as follows, significantly reducing prices, decreasing the share of market regarding the imported medicines, facilitating the manufacture of domestic medicines, encouraging foreign investment in manufacturing drugs domestically, controlling the shortage of drugs, and finally giving financial support to all patients in general and to those patients who had problem paying for drugs in particular.
Conclusion
These experiences which made the Iran pharmaceutical sector survive during the international sanctions, can be considered as a good example of resilience strategies in similar situations.
IFDA policies to improve access to pharmaceutical products in sanction.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the experts who participated in interviews and providing us the data on access and affordability of medicines.
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RD acted as the deputy minister and head of the IFDA, FP acted as the deputy for regulatory in IFDA, and HI acted as the head of planning department in IFDA during the policy implementation. Although NY, NM, and GGh acted as experts in IFDA for a while, they are not involved in IFDA practices during the mentioned crisis.
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Key Messages, detailing concisely the main points made in the paper
1- Flexible legislations can help Pharmaceutical market in crisis
2- Inter and intra cooperation is helpful in managing pharmaceutical market crisis
3- Resiliency should be noted in pharmaceutical system
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Yousefi, N., Moradi, N., Dinarvand, R. et al. Policies to improve access to pharmaceutical products in shortage: the experience of Iran food and drug administration. DARU J Pharm Sci 27, 169–177 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40199-019-00259-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40199-019-00259-2