Pharmaceuticals are a key input into health systems and an important factor for patient satisfaction. Ensuring access to essential medicines is one of the most effective ways to improve health outcomes. On the other hand, there are strong commercial interests at work in the market for pharmaceuticals; and buyers or payers find it hard to keep up with increasing demand and options. Corruption, bribery, lack of transparency and ethically questionable marketing practices are widespread, which is a major concern, since pharmaceutical expenditure grows rapidly in Europe and Central Asia without necessarily leading to improved health outcomes.

Improving transparency and governance of the sector, reducing the occurrence of unethical practices and controlling pharmaceutical expenditure so that limited resources are used in a way that benefits public health at least as much as private commercial interests is a key challenge. It requires a bundle of tools and measures, used within a consistent policy framework. Decisions on access to market and funding need to be made in a rules-based, transparent manner. Resource management should be based on monitoring of relevant parameters, allowing for adaptation to the behavior of market participants.

To assist decision makers faced with these challenges, the World Bank is offering a two day workshop on February 26-27, 2007 on Pharmaceutical Policy and Management. The workshop goal is addressing the issues pointed out above and sharing experiences from European countries . This is the second of a series of three workshops on different health policy topics.

This workshop will focus on practice and implementation rather than high-level concepts; key areas for discussion will be:

• Selection of drugs for reimbursement in the absence of sophisticated HTA tools
• Reducing the vulnerability for corruption in the sector
• Policy and regulatory strategies to support efficient resource management (for example how to implement a generic drug policy)
• Monitoring and evaluation for influencing provider behavior
• Balancing drug policy goals and managing expectations of the public and the industry

The expected outcomes of the course include: (i) improved knowledge among participants about the reasons for market failure in the pharmaceutical sector and how to prevent and address such failures; (ii) learning from practical examples how drug policy measures can be designed to contribute in an effective and politically feasible manner to transparency on a health system and provider level, and (iii) learning from interaction between representatives of various countries that are working on pharmaceutical reforms.

The venue of the workshop will be Budapest. The workshop is open to interested participants working in Ministries, health insurance funds, regulatory agencies and similar institutions from countries in the Europe and Central Asia Region and the Middle East and North Africa Region.