Sustainability in pharmaceutical pricing

Sustainability in Pharmaceutical Pricing

How Can Pharmaceutical Public-Private Partnerships Help to Achieve the Dissemination of affordable medicines - The Case of Anti Malaria Drugs in Nigeria?

Sustainability Perspective

Many individuals from developing countries who could benefit from pharmaceuticals products do not receive them due to high costs. Antiretroviral therapy's failure in reaching more than scant numbers of individuals in developing nations, suffering from AIDS, has drawn extensive publicity. However, even far cheaper medications that can be delivered easily aren't reaching numerous individuals who require them. Over a fourth of children all over the world and more than half of the children in a few nations do not receive vaccines, which come under the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Expanded Program on Immunization. Even though these vaccines only cost a family under a dollar a dose, they still cannot afford the medicine. The lack of access to beneficial pharmaceutical products and the inability of these families to afford the required medicine results deaths of three million deaths annually (World Bank, 2001).

My company, Cure Pharmaceutical, has experienced this with the launch of their cost effective Oral Rehydration Therapy (OTF) technology in Ghana. Cure Pharmaceutical entered a licensed distribution agreement with a private pharmaceutical company known as Dan Adams Corp. Nonetheless, the distribution of the technology was stymied by the lack of relations with the Ghanaian government and limited financial resources dedicated to this specific disease by the distributor. In this regard, the agreement between Cure Pharmaceutical and Dan Adams Corp failed to help achieve social sustainability, which is crucial towards promoting the health and well-being of a community. According to the Western Australia Council of Social Services (WACOSS), "social sustainability occurs when the formal and informal processes, systems, structures, and relationships actively support the capacity of current and future generations to create healthy and livable communities" (AUSPA, 2012).

The pharmaceutical market in the world's poorest nations is tiny, which is a contributor to limited access to medicine. For example, more money is spent in Connecticut on healthcare compared to thirty-eight low-income sub-Saharan African nations combined (World Bank, 2001b; U.S. Census, 2000). In 1998, the United States' private and public health spending accounted for 13% of its per capita income of nearly $32,000 for an overall of above $4,000 per individual. On the other hand, low-income nations from Africa's sub-Saharan region spent only 6% of their per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) averaging $300 or approximately $18 per person on health (World Bank, 2001b). This is an important metric for a pharmaceutical company to implement in their financial forecasting for developing an economically sustainable partnership.

Research Scope

This research focuses on analyzing how public-private partnerships may have beneficial outcomes on the price structure of essential medicines to third world countries and specifically to Nigeria. The research will attempt to ascertain both the benefits and obstacles associated with these types of partnerships in facilitating cost-effective therapeutics to third world countries. The research will further evaluate the financial landscape as well as the operational aspects of such partnerships. Comprehensive surveys will be conveyed from the main population that will entail the employees and executives from current and past public-private pharmaceutical partnerships (Robson & McCartan, 2016). On the other hand, the sample will entail three to five public-private partnerships that have recently implemented strategies for affordable medicines and distribution into emerging markets such as a highly successful public-private partnership model that Novartis formulated for delivering medication to rural areas of India via its ArogyaParivar scheme. The comprehensive survey will rely on the use of questionnaires which will be administered to the study's respondents. Accordingly, the questionnaires will pave the way for comprehensive and first-hand information acquisition. The access to these public-private partnerships will be gained through accessing my company's pharmaceutical and NGO's network and memberships.