Professor Presents to UN on Essential Medicines.
Veronika Wirtz, associate professor of global health, testified before the United Nations High Panel on Access to Medicines on March 9 in London.
Wirtz testified as a co-chair of The Lancet Commission on Essential Medicines Policies, presenting the commission’s objectives, preliminary findings, and recommendations.
The Lancet created the commission leading up to the 30th anniversary of the 1985 World Health Organization (WHO) Nairobi Conference on the Rational Use of Drugs. The Lancet Commission’s 21 independent public health and medical experts from 12 countries are analyzing progress made in global essential medicines policies since that conference.
“It is an incredible honor to lead—with two other colleagues—such an important commission, and a responsibility to produce something that has impact,” Wirtz says.
Before the UN High Panel, Wirtz discussed the progress and lessons of the last 30 years, and the commission’s developing agenda for the next two decades.
The commission focuses on five global challenges: financing essential medicines, making them affordable, preventing the marketing of substandard essential medicines, making use more efficient and safe, and ensuring global and national accountability.
Wirtz stressed the need for increasing equity in access to appropriate, available, and affordable essential medicines; instituting price monitoring and price transparency; and establishing a global and national accountability system to demonstrate progress.
Presenting to the UN High Panel was rewarding, she says, noting the “very positive feedback and challenging questions.” From the special invitation for the commission to testify, and from the way members of the panel engaged with Wirtz’ testimony, “we were able to feel that they were really recognizing the work that we were doing,” she says. “It was a mutually enriching process.”
The commission’s final findings, conclusions, and recommendations will be published in The Lancet this fall.
Wirtz’s co-chairs on the commission are Hans Hogerzeil of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and Andy Gray of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.