Pharmaceutical care as a right to preserve

Abstract

In the recent period, which runs from 2003 to mid-2016, the Ministry of Health created, within its structure, a Secretariat for Science, Technology and Strategic Inputs (SCTIE) and, linked to it, a Department of Pharmaceutical Assistance and Strategic Inputs ( DAF/SCTIE/MS), two loci of knowledge production and public policies aimed at access to medicine and science, technology and innovation in health. The intense work developed in these years identified gaps in the management process of health actions and programs aimed at access to medicines and pharmaceutical assistance, as well as the inexistence of actions that strengthen the public production of medicines and vaccines, which articulate the necessary training of pharmaceutical professionals to the Unified Health System (SUS), which would enable the structuring and qualification of Pharmaceutical Assistance (AF). Such gaps were associated with the significant fragmentation of actions and initiatives aimed at access to medicines, represented by the existence of approximately twenty-three different programs that dealt with medicines, with also fragmented and extemporaneous funding, with overlapping lists of medicines and with non-articulated management. . In the field of access to medicines, if the reduction in funding or the reduction of the "size of the SUS" are implemented, programs and projects of AF are at risk of being emptied, compromised or closed, harming the entire population that has in the SUS its main or single source of access. In this crucial moment in which Brazilian society lives, only with the strengthening of the SUS as a public policy, providing it with a sufficient budget and with a stable source, will the Federal, State and Municipal governments be able, together, to fulfill the mission of bringing health services with quality to the entire Brazilian population.