One of MeTA Zambia’s first and urgent duties will be to create individual awareness about medicines and health. The issues listed here are important to the individual as they are to many communities across Zambia.
- Access to Medicines
Many people in Zambia do not have access to quality and safe medicine. Many people in Zambia die from curable diseases mainly due to lack of access to essential medicine.
Besides survey data in Zambia shows evidence of drug diversion from clinics and hospitals to private institutions or to illegal drug stores. In many clinics/hospitals essential medicines are largely unavailable.
- Quality of Medicines
The quality of medicines on the market in Zambia varies greatly due to the weak regulatory authority and corruption allowing the presence of cheap poor quality products on the market. However, government is now addressing this problem and a new law will aim at legalising and rebranding illegal drug stores as Health Shops.
- Costing Medicines
Medicine costing is not regulated. Further costing mechanisms by individual suppliers are not transparent leading to certain medicines being unaffordable and prohibitively expensive for the majority of people who need of them. In some cases the same medicine is offered at different prices to government agencies by some suppliers.
- Medicine Use
It is estimated that most medicines especially antibiotics are improperly prescribed, dispensed or sold and that many patients fail to take their medicine properly or abuse such medicines. This information should be .disseminated to the wider public or used in advocacy campaigns.
- Funding and Medicines Supply Chain
In Zambia donors are more inclined to fund the purchase of drugs but ironically seem reluctant to invest in the supply chain and yet medicine distribution to hospitals and health centres is equally critical.
Medicine supply systems in Zambia are unreliable where failures at any point in the system may lead to shortages of medicines. Zambia has a number of reports related to the supply chain whose data on quality, availability, pricing and use of medicine has not been analysed.
The national supply chain is responsible for getting drugs and medical supplies from the manufacturer through various levels of the health system to the patient. It is also responsible for gathering information about the quantities of medicines issued or dispensed to users at all levels.