Meeting "Health in the Millennium"
|
Last month, on the 26th and 27th of May, the Official Association of Pharmacists in Barcelona was the venue of the Meeting “Health in the Millennium”, which was organized by Farmacéuticos Mundi and Medicus Mundi Catalunya, in order to evaluate the Millennium Development Goals in terms of health and to get to know the initiatives that are being set up in order to reach them.
This meeting gathered national and international experts from administrations, NGOs, southern countries, international entities and pharmaceutical laboratories.
On Friday morning and afternoon at the round tables, the speakers analysed the actual state of each Millennium Goal in the field of health and the public participated actively in an intensive debate, in which they expressed their doubts and worries. At the workshops, there was an even more important participation of the public, thanks to the fact that this kind of meeting and its format allowed and encouraged people to share experiences and opinions in a relaxed atmosphere.
The round table about access to medicines (on Saturday morning) was the most successful and the one that generated more debates. Around this one table people from NGOs, economists and pharmaceutical laboratories met to explain their own point of view, each one different from the others. The efforts realized during the preparation of the Meeting and the workshop bore fruit: the group presented a proposal consisting of 4 action points in order to improve access to medicines.
In a nutshell, the proposal pleads for: promoting more transparency in the pharmaceutical market, establishing mechanisms in order to encourage a real therapeutic innovation, promoting a powerful industry of generics of international scope, and supporting the proposal from Brazil and Kenya for the establishment of a Global Frame for health R+D in socially high-priority areas. This proposal will be examined in a Workgroup approved during the 59th World Health Assembly that took place one week before our meeting.
Among the conclusions drawn from the Meeting, it should be emphasized that, in order to reach the Millennium Development Goals in terms of health:
• it is important to follow –as much as possible– the national programs already existing in southern countries in order to fight against health problems and, if they do not exist, to create parallel initiatives that should be assumed later on by the local Health Ministry.
• there is a need to promote the training of health community agents and to create action protocols against any disease using easy and cheap mechanisms already available to the Health Ministries, the health centres and the ‘puestos de salud’.
• the role of the community agents in the fight against diseases needs to be promoted.
• it is also important to take into account the participation of the citizens as a means to know which are the community’s priorities in terms of health.
The Meeting was held in the frame of the public awareness campaign “Health in the Millennium, a missing signature”, aimed at explaining the Millennium Development Goals and their situation at the moment, in order to mobilize the population and to promote policies designed to reach these goals. In the web page of this campaign, www.lasalutenelmillenni.org, you can find a declaration to which people and organizations can adhere. Come and sign it!
During the campaign other activities will take place, such as: talks in hospitals, health centres, masters and postgraduate courses about health, cooperation and public policies. If you want us to come to you centre, visit the web page of the campaign.
More information at: www.lasalutenelmillenni.org
|