In September, 2018, the first international Medicine Quality and Public Health Conference was held at Oxford University, UK, to discuss opportunities and solutions to ensure that people worldwide have access to affordable and quality-assured medicines.
Over 150 researchers, advocates and policymakers from around the world came together to issue the Oxford Statement calling for investment, policy change, and action to tackle the growing burden of substandard and falsified medicines.
A recently published article in the Lancet ‘Global access to quality-assured medical products: the Oxford Statement and call to action’, written by Paul Newton, University of Oxford, and Katherine Bond, from our partner US Pharmacopeia, on behalf of the Oxford Statement signatories, now expands the statement with a call to action and a research agenda.
The call to action outlines four key interventions to ensure universal access to quality medical products:
- Adopting the WHO’ s “Prevent, Detect and Respond” strategy
- Increasing investments to strengthen supply chains and regulatory authorities
- Funding multidisciplinary research to understand the impact and solutions to this problem
- Greater collaboration and harmonization across national regulatory authorities
To reach the goal of ensuring access to quality medical products is universal it is imperative that
- Countries, patients, health workers and donors all have a role to play and need to be included when creating and developing policies
- More research is needed to provide updated data to better understand the impact and scale that poor-quality medical products have on global communities.
Fight the Fakes supports the call to action and would like to encourage everyone to speak up against the dangers of substandard and falsified medicines. To amplify our voice on social media, please share the quote cards below.
Let’s speak up and fight the fakes together!
