The formulation of pharmaceutical policy is a critical component of healthcare planning, made more important given that medicines are the ubiquitous technology in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease and constitute a significant proportion of health care expenditure. Pharmacists need to inform policy development that will, in its implementation, offer opportunity to deliver greate...

BACKGROUND Sex and gender sensitive inquiry is critical in pharmaceutical policy due to the sector's historical connection with women's health issues and due to the confluence of biological, social, political, and economic factors that shape the development, promotion, use, and effects of medicinal treatments. A growing number of research bodies internationally have issued laws, guidance or enc...

Considering the increasing interest in fuzzy theory and possible applications,the concept of fuzzy metric space concept has been introduced by severalauthors from different perspectives. This paper interprets the theory in termsof metrics evaluated on fuzzy numbers and defines a strong Hausdorff topology.We study interrelationships between this theory and other fuzzy theories suchas intuitionis...

Convexity theory and duality theory are important issues in math- ematical programming. Within the framework of credibility theory, this paper rst introduces the concept of convex fuzzy variables and some basic criteria. Furthermore, a convexity theorem for fuzzy chance constrained programming is proved by adding some convexity conditions on the objective and constraint functions. Finally,...

OBJECTIVES We describe a key informant study that invited national medicines policy leads for the European Union member states to self-assess the level of implementation of medicines adherence initiatives in their country and the adequacy of that implementation. Interviews with medicines policy leads enabled in-depth understanding of the variation in adherence support across nations and the way...

Health care systems spend a relatively high percentage of their resources on the purchase of medicines, and the poor spend a disproportionate amount of their income on pharmaceuticals. There is ample evidence in the literature that drugs are very poorly used. World Bank-led health reforms aim at improving equity, efficiency, quality, and users' satisfaction, and it will be difficult to achieve ...

INTRODUCTION Policy-makers worldwide struggle to balance health with industrial policy objectives in the pharmaceutical sector. Tensions arise over pricing and reimbursement in particular. What health plans view as necessary to maintain equitable access to medicines, industry views as inimical to R&D and innovation. Australia has grappled with this issue for years, even incorporating the goal o...

ONGOING DEBATES IN THE PHARMACEUTICAL SECTOR ABOUT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, PRICING AND REIMBURSEMENT, AND PUBLIC RESEARCH INVESTMENTS HAVE A COMMON DENOMINATOR: the pursuit of innovation. However, there is little clarity about what constitutes a true pharmaceutical innovation, and as a result there is confusion about what kind of new products should be pursued, protected and encouraged through h...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE With constant incentives for healthcare payers to contain their pharmaceutical budgets, modelling policy decision impact became critical. The objective of this project was to test the impact of various policy decisions on pharmaceutical budget (developed for the European Commission for the project 'European Union (EU) Pharmaceutical expenditure forecast' - http://ec.eur...

Powerset structures of extensional fuzzy sets in sets with similarity relations are investigated. It is proved that extensional fuzzy sets have powerset structures which are powerset theories in the category of sets with similarity relations, and some of these powerset theories are defined also by algebraic theories (monads). Between Zadeh's fuzzy powerset theory and the classical powerset theo...