Rob Baltussen, Professor of Global Health Economics at Radboudumc, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Does WHO provide the best possible advice on cancer medicines to African countries? Our answer is: not really.
WHO’s essential medicines lists are very influential. Many countries use them when developing their own national medicines lists and health benefit packages. For cancer medicines this matters a lot. Some are very expensive. Including them may mean that other services are displaced, within cancer care or elsewhere in the health system.
In our new paper in BMJ Global Health, we analysed 160 WHO modifications to essential cancer medicines between 2017 and 2023. Only 11% included cost data and only 9% included cost-effectiveness evidence. And where cost-effectiveness evidence was used, it had very limited relevance for African low- and lower-middle-income countries.
We are not blaming WHO for this and think that the challenge is more fundamental: there is little economic evidence available across the broad array of health services and across many African countries. But the absence of economic evidence does have serious consequences. Countries are asked to make difficult choices without adequate evidence on affordability, value for money and opportunity costs.
One of our recommendations to WHO is therefore to make economic evidence a more explicit requirement in the essential medicines process, especially for high-cost cancer medicines. And where such evidence is not available, this uncertainty should be made much clearer to countries.”
Title: Weak economic evidence for WHO’s essential cancer medicines for Africa
Authors: Aron van der Steege, James Humuza, Cyprien Shyirambere, Hans Hogerzeil, Rob Baltussen
Read the Full Article on BMJ Global Health
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