A call for help, please

Immunization supply chains are regularly reviewed and plans made to improve them. All of the GAVI eligible countries carry our regular and comprehensive EVM reviews which help ministries focus their attention on the parts that most need help. Supply chains for drugs are not so fortunate; assessment of performance seem to be quite rare. A group of pharmaceutical companies, however, led by GSK, have recently started to work together to coordinates and streamline their international shipments, Also, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting some work by JSI and others to improve the effectiveness of the drugs supply chains in the countries from the Central Medical Stores to the individual patients. We are looking for studies of drugs supply chains that have been carried out over the past few years from any of the 70 or so poorest countries. These studies will be analysed as a group to help focus development on what problems need to be resolved as a priority. These may be lack of transport capacity, funds for distribution, storage space, staff management, etc. These studies may have been done by the Ministries of Health, the Global Fund, WHO, MSH, USAID, or other organizations. All drug supply studies will be useful but we are particularly interested in drug supply chains that operate in a campaign-style, for example, with one or two distributions each year – as is typical for drug distributions for neglected tropical diseases. If you would like the country of origin of the study to be kept confidential please indicate this with your reference to where we can access the study. Please send the study you know about, or where the study can be accesses online, to the TechNet-21 Moderator. Many thanks, James Cheyne.