Literature search strategyTo assess the experience from developing countries on the use of medicines, we undertook a systematic inventory of published and unpublished intervention trials and policy evaluations that met the following inclusion criteria: studies had to be from developing countries, broadly defined as countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America not on the OECD list of industrialized countries; studies had to describe the results of a planned intervention or examine the impact of a clearly delineated government programs, policies, and man- dates targeting patterns of drugs use and factors directly affecting use which are implemented on a national, regional, or sectoral scale.We first screened the archives and computerized databases of INRUD (Ross-Degnan et al., 1992) and WHO/DAP for relevant journal articles, research proposals, theses, reports, and newsletters describing interventions, completed or in progress. We next searched the Medline (1966–1999) and Healthline (1975–1999). We also hand searched articles published between 1990–1999 identified in the tables of contents of 27 medical and pharmacy journals that publish articles on drug utilization, as well as several published annotated bibliographies (Hardon, van der Geest et al., 1991; WHO, 1994). Finally, we solicited materials of interest via mailed letters and electronic correspondence on the E-Drug Internet mailing list from individuals and organizations known to be involved in improving the use of medicines.Overview of the reviewed studiesA total of 36 pieces of published and unpublished work } consisting of 18 journal articles, 13 reports, 1 book chapter, 1 booklet, 2 theses, and 1 conference presentation } were screened. Those reports that were not related to the issues addressed here } such as evaluations of NDP effects on local drug production capability, procurement price, and costbenefit analysisof ED procurement program } were excluded from this review.Eighteen reports evaluating national policies were selected for analysis. The evaluated interventions fall into three broad categories:* Multi-Component National Drug Policies* Drug Supply and Cost Sharing Programs* Regulatory MeasuresThe majority of these studies utilized weak research designs that evaluated programs solely on the basis of post-intervention measures. Thus, the reports of the effects of these policies must be interpreted with extreme caution because it is impossible to know whether any post-intervention observations were higher, lower, or the same as before the policy intervention. It has been established previously that such poorly controlled studies produce misleading and unreliable estimates of the effects of drug policies (Soumerai, Ross-Degnan, Fortess, & Abelson, 1993). Moreover, because most of these interventions were applied on a nation-wide basis, a control group is therefore not available for compar- ison. Fortunately, several evaluation designs were stronger (e.g., pre–post and post-only repeated mea- sures). Because of the lack of sufficient objective, quantifiable data from these studies to determine how effective these interventions are, we decided not to estimate the effect size of the poorly evaluated interventions.The distribution of designs in the reviewed studies is presented in Fig. 1. The evaluation designs are sorted by types of intervention in Table 1. Table 2 summarizes types of intervention by country. These evaluations were conducted on national programs carried out in 14 Asian, 9 African, 1 Eastern European, and 2 Latin American countries. (Note that the WHO multi-country comparative analysis of national drug policies accounts for the difference in the total number of the countries described in Table 2 and the number of studies in Table 1).
Macro level interventions: existing evidence of policy performance
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