The Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) program works with partners to develop and implement systems-level interventions to combat poor-quality medicines.
The PQM program helps partners to address weaknesses in quality assurance systems that lead to the proliferation of poor-quality medicines. By focusing on strengthening quality systems—such as resolving systemic weaknesses in the regulation and manufacture of medical products—our partners are making meaningful improvements to their overall health systems.
Health Systems Strengthening
To help countries combat poor-quality medicines, PQM helps partners strengthen health systems. Our efforts target the building blocks of health systems, and help change system behaviors, so overtime they become more efficient, reliable, responsive, and sustainable.
Building Quality into Processes and Products
From development to consumption, the therapeutic product lifecycle provides opportunities to apply proven safeguards, technologies, and innovations to better ensure quality. We help partners strategically harness these opportunities and deliberately build quality into processes and products.
Developing Tailored Solutions
We approach problems differently at PQM simply because we have learned each is unique. While the tools, methods, and approaches deployed may be similar, the context of the problem and stakeholders involved vary and greatly influence program design and implementation. As a result, no two countries and no two manufacturers have the exact same design and implementation approach. At the start of any intervention, we extract learnings from partners to better understand their existing systems and challenges. We then translate these findings and PQM-conducted assessments into strategic and practical approaches tailored to meet defined needs and goals.
Promoting Greater Health Coverage
A well-functioning national pharmaceutical quality assurance system is vital to achieving universal health coverage. Since a significant proportion of health budgets are typically spent on medicines, efficiencies gained in the pharmaceutical system can greatly impact health coverage for the population. By focusing on improvements in drug quality assurance, PQM helps countries reduce pharmaceutical system inefficiencies so they can fully realize the intended public health benefits of medicines, protect investments, and safeguard resources. We help countries increase access to essential medicines of sufficient quality to be safe and effective, which promotes greater treatment coverage.
Collaborating for Greater Impact
Only through collaboration can we better understand the context, nature, and scope of our world’s complex health challenges, and develop targeted, intentional, and cost-beneficial responses and solutions to overcome them.