423P - Maintaining a national essential medicine list for cancer in Malaysia: Where do we stand?

Background

The World Health Organization (WHO) developed its Model Lists of Essential Medicines in 1977 with the aim to help countries prioritize and select the medicines to include in their national essential medicines lists and, increasingly, national reimbursable medicines lists. Besides conventional chemotherapy, hormonal therapy and targeted therapy are also listed.

Methods

A review of the antineoplastic chapter between the WHO Essential Medicines List (EML) and the Malaysian National Essential Medicine List (NEML) was made. The number of medicines in each list were compared between the year 2007 to 2019.

Results

WHO published the first EML in 1977, however, the consideration of anticancer therapies has only been substantial since the year 1999. The Malaysian NEML included 83.3% of the drugs in WHO EML in the 2014 edition, and 86.2% in the 2019 edition. In 2013, WHO audited the NEML of 135 countries against the 25 anti-cancer medicines (excluding hormonal therapy) in the WHO EML. The median number of medicines included was 17 worldwide, while the Malaysian NEML listed 21 medicines. For the WHO essential medicine list, the antineoplastic segment included 22, 30 and 58 medicines in the years 2007, 2013 and 2019 respectively. For the Malaysian national essential medicine list, there was no inclusion of antineoplastic agents until the year 2014 (3^rd edition). There were 25 and 50 medicines in the years 2014 and 2019 respectively.

Conclusions

The Malaysian NEML includes more than 80% of cancer medicines listed in the WHO EML. This statistic remains consistent with the evolution of WHO EML and performs above the world average.

Clinical trial identification

Editorial acknowledgement

Legal entity responsible for the study

The author.

Funding

Has not received any funding.

Disclosure

The author has declared no conflicts of interest.