Suspended in 2025/26
HP435      Half Unit
Global Access to Medicines

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Availability

An estimated 1 in 4 people worldwide lack access to essential medicines, with prescription drugs often unaffordable or unavailable. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals call for member states to guarantee “access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all” by 2030. Yet precisely how this will be achieved remains highly contested among global health stakeholders.

This course asks students to explore the complex and contentious world of drug development and regulation across the globe. It will touch on topics such as incentives for research and development in the drug industry, intellectual property rights and medicines, and pricing and financing of essential medicines. The course lies at the intersection of health and public policy, economics, public health, and development studies.

The lectures and seminars will draw on real-world case studies to explore key policy and economic issues affecting pharmaceutical markets in a range of countries, with an emphasis on the affordability, availability, and accessibility of medicines and vaccines. The course will investigate these issues from the perspectives of different stakeholders, including health ministries and other government bodies, drug companies, non-governmental organizations, physicians, pharmacists, and patients.

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

1. Describe key features of pharmaceutical markets.
2. Identify policy and economic issues affecting access to medicines globally.
3. Assess national drug policies using an access to medicines framework.
4. Compare and contrast pharmaceutical policies regionally or internationally.
5. Evaluate pharmaceutical policy options given a set of aims and assumptions.
6. Critically appraise the quality of theoretical and empirical studies of pharmaceutical policies.

15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

1. Bigdeli M, Jacobs B, Tomson G, et al (2013). “Access to medicines from a health system perspective.” Health Policy and Planning, 28: 692-704.
2. Cameron A, Ewen M, Ross-Degnan D, et al (2009). “Medicine prices, availability, and affordability in 36 developing and middle-income countries: A secondary analysis.” The Lancet, 373: 240-249.
3. Nguyen TA, Knight R, Roughead EE, et al (2015). “Policy options for pharmaceutical pricing and purchasing: Issues for low- and middle-income countries.” Health Policy and Planning, 30: 267-280.
4. Shadlen KC, Sampat BN, Kapczynski A (2020). “Patents, trade and medicines: Past, present and future.” Review of International Political Economy, 25(1): 75-97.
5. Wirtz VJ, Hogerzeil HV, Gray AL, et al (2017). “Essential medicines for universal health coverage.” The Lancet, 389(10067): 403-476.
6. Wouters OJ, McKee M, Luyten J (2020). “Estimated research and development investment needed to bring a new medicine to market, 2009-2018.” JAMA, 323(9): 844-853.
7. Wouters OJ, Shadlen KC, Salcher-Konrad M, et al (2021). “Challenges in ensuring global access to COVID-19 vaccines: Production, affordability, allocation, and deployment.” The Lancet, 397(10278): 1023-1034.

Essay (100%, 4000 words)