VietNamNet Bridge – Locally-produced drugs satisfy nearly 50
percent of treatment demand. Their quality is said to be inferior to imported
products. But doctors do not list them in prescriptions, while many patients
prefer foreign drugs because they think that the expensive drugs are better
than cheap ones.
Ms Linh in Dong Da district,
Hanoi, took her 5-year-old daughter to a private clinic for examination.
Doctors said the kid had a sore throat and otitis. They filled a prescription
with 6 kinds of medicines, which are all imported products.
Linh had to pay around VND670,000
($33) for the prescription but she said it is okay because foreign drugs are
better than domestic products. She was willing to pay highly for drugs to
quickly cure her daughter’s diseases.
Many people have the same idea
with Linh.
According to some drugstores,
doctors prefer imported medicines in their prescriptions. Meanwhile, patients
insist to buy the medicines in prescriptions though the similar products,
supplied by local pharmaceutical firms, are cheaper.
In many cases, if the prices for
domestic medicines are too cheap, buyers doubt whether cheap drugs work
effectively?
Ms. Linh, a pharmacist who runs a
drugstore in Hanoi, said that Vietnamese do not like drugs of India and
Thailand because they thought that the quality of these products is similar to
Vietnamese products. They favor drugs from France and the UK the most, Linh
said.
However, Linh also trusted
imported medicines than Vietnamese medicine.
Not only patients, but also
doctors do not trust the quality of Vietnamese medicines. At big state-owned
hospitals, domestically-made drugs account for merely 12 percent of the total
value of medicines in use. The highest number at district-level hospitals is 62
percent.
“Quality of many locally-made
drugs is inferior to imported products. We give priority to drugs of Vietnam;
but anyways, the most important criterion for selecting medicines is
effectiveness and safety. Price comes later,” said Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Hien, deputy
director of the Hanoi-based Bach Mai Hospital.
Mr. Tran Viet Tiep, director of
the Vietnam-Sweden Friendship Hospital in Quang Ninh province, said that
Vietnamese pharmaceutical firms cannot make many specialized medicines, for
example cardiovascular, cancer, anti-virus, desensitizer or diabetes, so
hospitals have no choice rather than using imported drugs.
Vietnam currently has 180 drug
producers.
Tiep added that it is difficult
to assess the quality of locally-made drugs because up to 90 percent of
materials are imported, mainly from China, India, Singapore and Italy.
The Ministry of Health on August
20 held the campaign “Vietnamese people give priority to use Vietnamese medicines.”
The program aims to change Vietnamese people’s awareness of locally-made drugs,
encourage Vietnamese people to use Vietnamese drugs and to make influence on
doctors’ prescriptions.
Compiled by Thu Ha
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