The Next Frontier for Public Health Medicines Market

Despite great strides in the delivery of healthcare in the developing world availability and access to quality-assured essential medicines and health technologies remains a challenge and the holy grail of the international public health community. The current efforts and approaches to improving access to essential medicines as good and noble as they are are not sufficient to meet the global health objectives for sustainable development and universal access to critical essential medicines. A key organization like WHO acknowledges that it has struggled to improve access to medicines throughout its nearly 70-year history (WHO 2017). WHO’s former Director General aptly captured this challenge thus (WHO 2017); “Nearly 2 billion people have no access to basic medicines causing a cascade of preventable misery and suffering”.