Literature review and comments on implementation outcomes of the essential medicine system in China / 中华医院管理杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective A systematic review of implementation outcomes of the essential medicine system in China to identify scientific evidences for a better system.Methods A systematic review is made to extract data from the research papers on outcomes of the essential medicine system,followed by an analysis and description of such data.Results Of the 87 papers included,most of them focused on primary care institutions,while four of them on residents or patients,and one of them on pharmaceutical enterprises.The study found the medical institutions with rising availability of essential drugs,lowered medicine costs,rising or dropping business volume,and apparent drop of out-of-pocket expenses for patients.These have encouraged rational drug use.Evidences in hand indicate expected outcomes from the essential medicine system.Conclusion Current researches on the system focus on primary care institutions in developed areas in China,lacking rigorous design.Studies of broader scale,further depth and more rigorous designs of the implementations of the system are recommended for evaluation of the impacts and outcomes of the system on various stakeholders of the policy.