MEASURING TRANSPARENCY TO IMPROVE GOOD GOVERNANCE OF PHARMACEUTICALS IN INDONESIA

Abstract

A national survey has been conducted to assess the
transparency in public pharmaceutical sector in Indonesia. The
survey was conducted during 2007, and writer was appointed
by the government as independent assessor. The assessment
covered five functions of government in pharmaceutical sector,
i.e., registration, control of promotion, inspection of production,
selection of essential medicines, and central procurement of
national buffer stock. Key informants were selected based on
first-hand knowledge on each function, representing
government, pharmaceutical company, academe/professionals,
and NGOs, i.e. 10 informants for each registration, control of
promotion, inspection of production, selection of essential
medicines, and 20 informants for central procurement. Data
were collected by means of in-depth interviews, using sets of
questionnaires provided by the WHO. Findings were analyzed
following a scoring system that ranging from zero to ten. The
smaller the score indicates in-transparency, and therefore
indicates the more vulnerability for corruption.
The results showed that the registration process scored 7.2,
control of promotion scored 7.6, inspection of production scored
8.7, selection of essential medicines scored only 5.5, and the
central procurement scored 7.0. In general, it is appreciated
that the functions of registration, control of promotion,
inspection, and procurement were well governed, but the
selection of essential medicines obtained a low score. There
has been remarkable lacking of written procedures that publicly
available. In regard to the selection function, there is no written
procedure in every process of selection, i.e., selection criteria
of the revision committee member, written criteria for application,
written criteria for addition, substitution and deletion, and written
procedures of decision making. Declaration of interest is to
some extents, lacking from most functions. It was
recommended that the Government should establish written
procedures of each function and make them publicly available,
establish mechanism to minimize conflict of interest in each
function i.e., by means of declaration of interest, and establish
measures to fill up regulatory gaps. By the time of publication,
corrective actions in all five functions have been made and at
the time being the Government is ready for re-assessment.
Key words: transparency, pharmaceuticals, good governance,
public sector, vulnerability for corruption