Lead Essay: Money, Equity and Access to Medicines

Race, money and medicines.

Taking notice of race is both risky and inevitable, in medicine no less than in other endeavors. On the one hand, race can be a useful stand-in for unstudied genetic and environmental factors that yield differences in disease expression and therapeutic response. Attention to race can make a therapeutic difference, to the point of saving lives. On the other hand, racial distinctions have social ...

Access to medicines and global health: will Canada lead or flounder?

Access to hepatitis C medicines

Hepatitis C is a global epidemic. Worldwide, 185 million people are estimated to be infected, most of whom live in low- and middle-income countries. Recent advances in the development of antiviral drugs have produced therapies that are more effective, safer and better tolerated than existing treatments for the disease. These therapies present an opportunity to curb the epidemic, provided that t...

Community Health Worker Programs to Improve Healthcare Access and Equity: Are They Only Relevant to Low- and Middle-Income Countries?

Background Community Health Workers (CHWs) are proven to be highly effective in low- and middle-income countries with many examples of successful large-scale programs. There is growing interest in deploying CHW programs in high-income countries to address inequity in healthcare access and outcomes amongst population groups facing disadvantage. This study is the first that examines the scope and...

pharmaceutical strategic purchasing: a key to improve access to medicines

pharmaceuticals are often considered as the most significant cost driver of health care expenditures and at the same time have a major impact on patients’ curative processes and outcomes. other pieces of evidence emphasize that drugs are the input for the production of good health. they are considered as the most important and expensive element in the healthy supply chain and are more associate...