The Cabinet of Ministers approved the State Strategy for Implementation of State Policy for Provision of Population with Medicines till 2025

On December 5, 2018, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted Resolution No. 1022, which approved the State Strategy for Implementation of State Policy for Provision of Population with Medicines till 2025 (hereinafter - the State Strategy).

The State Strategy is a system of actions, measures, normative legal acts and priorities defined in the system of health care aimed at solving a set of mutually related problems in the area of providing population with qualitative, effective and safe medicines.

The major tasks of the State Strategy include:

• ensuring the proper selection of essential vital medicines to the National List of Essential Medicines;
• availability of medicines;
• improvement of state regulation and quality assurance of medicines;
• raising the level of rational use of medicines;
• proper financing of the supply of population with medicines;
• improvement of the medicines supply system;
• increasing investment attractiveness of Ukrainian pharmaceutical market in the field of development and research of medicines, etc.

The State Strategy is supplemented with a plan of measures for its implementation related to the above-mentioned tasks which specifies the dates and actors responsible for the implementation of these measures.

Implementation of the State Strategy is forthcoming during the 2018-2025 for a long-term perspective. It is expected to achieve the following results:

• to increase the health indicators of the population;
• to increase the level of access of the population to high-quality, efficient and safe medicines;
• to reduce the population's expenditures on medicines and to increase the level of provision of medicines by the state;
• to ensure the rational use of medicines in accordance with the clinical needs of patients;
• to develop an effective mechanism for allocating funds from the state and local budgets to provide population with medicines;
• to expand public access to important information on medicines;
• to attract foreign investments in the framework of conducting clinical trials on the basis of domestic health care institutions;
• to improve the protection of the rights of patients and healthy volunteers involved in clinical trials.

It should be reminded that the development of the State Strategy was carried out by a working party under the Ministry of Health of Ukraine during 2017-2018. Legal support of this process was provided by the Legal Alliance Company.

The State Strategy is developed based on the WHO recommendations, and strategy tasks meet Sustainable Development Goals for 2016-2023 approved at 70^th session of the UN General Assembly. The Strategy prescribes harmonization of the Ukrainian legislation with the EU legislation, which will allow for ensuring safety of medicines use.