Typically, the pharmaceutical management component of child health programs is neglected and, therefore, often is the weak part of the system, lacking in essential medicines and commodities.
The RPM Plus Program has developed tools to assess strengths and weaknesses of pharmaceutical management systems to guide intervention development in support of child health programs.
In collaboration with other key players in child health, RPM Plus applies its technical expertise through a systems approach. The systems approach typically follows several key steps—
- Initiating dialogue at the international and policy levels
- Facilitating communication between stakeholders
- Identifying problems through pharmaceutical management systems diagnosis at the country level in collaboration with local child health programs
- Conducting options-analysis workshops with local stakeholders to discuss findings and identify and prioritize interventions
- Promoting evidence-based interventions
- Monitoring and evaluating program activities
The targets of RPM Plus activities are ministries of health at the central, regional, and district levels, as well as stakeholders in the private sector and caregivers in the community. RPM Plus also works in close collaboration with a variety of other partners.
A particular area of focus of the RPM Plus strategy is on interventions in the private sector to increase access to medicines for child health, because experience teaches that many sick children do not obtain treatment from the public sector.
Lessons learned and the experiences from these interventions, as well as those in the public sector, are shared and used to raise awareness of the importance of pharmaceutical management for child health.
RPM Plus is also working with partners to advocate for and implement community case management (CCM) for diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia. This alliance is an effort to bring appropriate case management as close as possible to the home and therefore the child. RPM Plus is collaborating with BASICS, the CORE group, IRC and other private voluntary organizations (PVOs) on a global level and in Senegal, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda to provide technical input on aspects of pharmaceutical management for CCM.
The RPM Plus strategy for its child survival portfolio is to promote pharmaceutical management for child survival in the widest possible sense, collaborating with and advocating to other international and regional organizations in child health to include pharmaceutical management on the global, regional, and national child health agendas of donors, ministries of health, and other implementing organizations.
