On June 30th the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) launched the country’s first National Medicines Policy (NMP) in Port-au-Prince. The policy, developed by the Haitian MSPP with the support of SIAPS Program, establishes a framework for pharmaceutical regulation in the country.
The launch was chaired by Haitian Prime Minister Evans Paul and attended by around 200 stakeholders and members of the global health community, including representatives from USAID, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Haitian government, and SIAPS Program.
Prime Minister Paul hailed the NMP as an essential step toward achieving the MSPP’s goal of ensuring the availability, accessibility, and optimal use of affordable essential medicines by 2035. “[The NMP] is the result of a long participatory process with the involvement of all stakeholders from the public and private sectors,” he said. “The document addresses…important questions such as those concerning regulation and control of the use and production of traditional medicines. Moreover, it touches on the question of harmonization between conventional and traditional medicine, as well as the issue of reducing healthcare costs while supporting job creation.”
For more information on the creation of the NMP (and SIAPS Program’s role in the process), see our blog post.
