On February 14, the Right to Health Committee received representatives of the pharmaceutical services sector who made observations on the draft law of the Organic Health Code, within the framework of a process of socialization of the initiative carried out by the committee.

The meeting was attended by Ana María Molina representing the Fybeca Group and René Viteri, president of the National Association of Pharmacy Owners of Ecuador (UNRPOFE). Both representatives of the pharmaceutical services sector expressed their commitment to guarantee the accessibility and availability of quality medicines and medical devices throughout the territory.

With respect to the observations on the Code, they proposed to eliminate the minimum 20% of nursing homes inventories in pharmaceutical establishments and the possibility that pharmacies could provide injectology services and vital signs. They also proposed the elimination of prescriptions for the sale of breast milk substitutes. “We are committed to promoting breastfeeding, but imposing a prescription generated certain limitations,” said Ana Molina.

For its part, Viteri proposed to modify the obligation to prescribe drugs by full box instead of tablets. In this sense he proposed to analyze the case of “a person who needs to take seven tablets, according to the medical prescription, but the box comes in 30, which affects the economy of poor people.”

At the end of the interventions, the committee’s chairman William Garzón, said that the proposals of the representatives of the pharmaceutical services sector will be taken into consideration but that some of them require a serious discussion, especially in the case of the elimination of the recipes of the full box of medicines.