We are delighted to announce the publication in BMJ Global Health of our first systematic review: How primary healthcare workers obtain information during consultations to aid safe prescribing in low-income and lower middle-income countries.
This was a huge collective effort led by Chris Smith of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Nagasaki University, and supported by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and HIFA. We screened over 60,000 papers, of which 23 met our inclusion criteria. The findings confirmed 'a lack of up-to-date and relevant medicine information in low and lower middle-income settings'.
We would like to thank all the authors and contributors who helped make this happen. This has been a wonderful collaboration and it will greatly help to inform next steps to accelerate progress towards the vision of the HIFA Prescribers and Users of Medicines expert working group: A world where every prescriber and user of medicines will have access to independent, reliable, understandable information on the full range of commonly prescribed medicines and will know where to find iit.
CITATION: How primary healthcare workers obtain information during consultations to aid safe prescribing in low-income and lower middle-income countries: a systematic review. Chris Smith, Michelle Helena van Velthoven, Nguyen Duc Truong, Nguyen Hai Nam, VÅ© Phan Anh, Tareq Mohammed Ali AL-Ahda, Osama Gamal Hassan, Basel Kouz, Nguyen Tien Huy, Malcolm Brewster, Neil Pakenham-Walsh. BMJ Global Health 2020;5:e002094. Published on 2nd April 2020
https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/4/e002094
We invite everyone to read and comment, and share direct with BMJ Global Health [info.bmjgh@bmj.com] and/or here on the HIFA forum.
This paper serves as a vital baseline assessment/situation analysis on which we can build future advocacy and action. There can be no area of health more important than access to reliable information to inform prescribing, no area of health that ios more perverted by commercial interests, and no area of health that presents such an important and growing existential threat to human existence (the predicted post-antibiotic apocalypse).
The HIFA Prescribers and Users of Medicines project is seeking £5,000 to sponsor our work for the coming 12 months. If you, or someone you know, can help, please contact the HIFA Coordinator, Neil Pakenham-Walsh: neil@hifa.org
