As a way of bridging the gap in accessing quality health care in the country, the CEO of Merck Pharmaceutical, Dr Stefan Oschmann has urged all drugs manufacturers to embark on measures that will make medicines available and affordable to the poor man on the street.
Oschamnn who was speaking during the unveiling of their Lagos office, there is the need to reduce the prices of medicines in the country, in order to solve the problem of inaccessible health care in the country.
“We are thinking of cutting down the prices of our medicines in Nigeria. Such things are currently going on in Ghana where we make products available at a much lower price for the public system and charge regular price in the private system for the people who can afford it. So there are plenty of things we want to do in Nigeria. And again, we are very optimistic that we are going to make huge progress in the future”, he said.
He further noted that: “Access to quality medicines is very important. Our industry needs to make sure that we adopt our business model, so that we can make medicines available at prices that the common man on the street can be able to buy it.
“We need to be involved with public-private partnership; we also need to do private partnerships. We need to join forces with Nigerian players to make medicines more affordable. We need to work on supply chain, security and reliability.
“We need to make sure that medicines are safely distributed to the people that need them and in some areas, such as the neglected tropical diseases, we need to work on our social responsibilities programmes and donate medicines because the very poor cannot afford the very cheap medicines”.
