Physician concerns about medicine quality - India

By Roger Bate

The Safe Medicines Coalition is undertaking surveys of physicians in different cities in the world to ascertain knowledge and concern about inferior medicine quality. The first survey results were from Africa and were reported here. Today we report the summary statistics for three Indian cities, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. Forty general physicians from these cities were surveyed. Some questions do not lend themselves to statistical compilation, so they are left blank in table 1 below.

Overall the results are “better” than for Africa. Fewer doctors have encountered as many problems with medicines and generally there is more trust in the systems in place. However less than half of the physicians in Chennai (45%) thought the regulators did a good job. Kolkata and Delhi had better results in this regard, perhaps the local regulators do a better job in those states than in Tamil Nadu. As in Africa, many physicians are still worried that the regulators are letting inferior products on to the market, which isn’t surprising given the poor quality of medicines we occasionally found in our surveys.


India Stats
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