Private Sector &Procurement Supply Management &Treatment Bill Brieger | 05 Oct 2014 04:11 am
Licensed chemical sellers and antimalarial prices in northern Ghana under the affordable medicines facility
The recently concluded Global Health Systems Research Symposium in Cape Town featured a number of abstracts that touched directly or indirectly on malaria. Malaria services and movement toward malaria elimination cannot be achieved in a country without a strong health system that involves both communities, program staff and policy makers.
Below is an abstract by Heather Lanthorn of the Harvard School of Public Health on the AMFm program testing in Ghana. Other abstracts will appear subsequently.
“The Affordable Medicines Facility – malaria (AMFm) represents an important experiment in using private retail chains to improve access to medicines in low- and middle-income countries. AMFm aimed to make quality-assured artemisinin-based combination therapies (QA.ACTs) accessible at the variety of outlets where citizens treat fevers. In Ghana, where ACTs are legally sold over the counter, Licensed Chemical Sellers (LCS) are a key antimalarial provider.
“I use a framework adapted from industrial organization to study a unique, geo-coded data set of 250 LCSs in and around Tamale, Ghana collected explicitly for this study. Through well-integrated quantitative (multiple logistic regression) and qualitative (open thematic analysis) approaches, I analyze: the experiences of LCSs with AMFm; LCS reported compliance with recommended retail prices (RRPs); LCS economic and social explanations for compliance; and associations between LCS objective characteristics – including geo-location – and RRP compliance.
“We find high stocking of subsidized QA.ACTs and high RRP compliance. 18% of LCSs report selling above the RRP. The majority of non-compliers cite rising prices from their supplier as the major determinant of their own pricing. The majority of non-compliers sold at USD 1.5 rather than the RRP, USD 1.0. Indeed, in the quantitative analysis, RRP compliance is most clearly associated with the distributor prices and with LCS reputation (years in business).
“A driving motivation for experimentally piloting AMFm was to learn whether the QA.ACT subsidy would be passed on to end-line private retailers and, in turn, to consumers. We find that, largely, it is. By considering LCSs both as economic agents and community members, the present analyses accord with, complement and innovate on the large, independent evaluation of AMFm, which focused on prices but neither objective nor perceptual explanations for price-compliance.”