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- Published on: 25 November 2016
- Published on: 25 November 2016Essential Medicines List: a good start, but just a start
The comparison of national vs. WHO essential medicine lists (EML) with respect to medications used in pediatric endocrinology by Rowlands et al. highlights an important health care delivery gap for children with endocrine disorders.
However, as the authors correctly point out, accessibility is far more limited than reflected by the EMLs. We argue that many medications listed on EMLs are not actually available to most patients in resource-limited settings and that all five dimensions of access including availability, affordability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality (1), are suboptimal for medications relevant to pediatric endocrinology. While EMLs may be a rough surrogate of availability, as a metric they cannot take into account stock-outs and limited numbers of pharmacies carrying the medication, both frequent occurences in resource-constrained settings. Similar to cardiovascular medications (2), limited affordability is a major access barrier in a country like Haiti where close to 60% and 25% of the population live under the national and extreme poverty lines, respectively (3). Accessibility adds to the barriers where pharmacies are distant from patient residencies, acceptability can be challenging in cultures where traditional practices are common, and quality of medications may vary widely in settings with little regulatory supervision and compliance. A case in point is propylthyrouracil, a drug that carries a black box warning (4), which is on the EML,...
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None declared.