Pharmaceutical services in countries included in the Health In Transition (HIT)

a comparative analysis

Abstract

HIT, Health In Transition, are publications of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies that systematically describe the functioning of health systems in countries, organization of services and policies under development. The purpose of this article was to analyze the conformation of pharmaceutical services in four countries included in the European Union (Spain, France, Portugal and Italy), an organization of public policies and the processes of access to medicines based on HIT publications. In addition, scientific articles were included that included analyzes of the pharmaceutical policies of the inserted countries, published between 2000 and 2018, were included, selected from the Scielo, Virtual Health Library (VHL) databases, Capes journals, Science direct, Web of Sience, Pubmed. The following descriptors were used to search for articles: Pharmaceutical Assistance, Pharmaceutical Care or Care and Pharmaceutical Services. The final sample of the review was found by 41 scientific articles and 10 technical documents. The data indicate that health policies have many similarities in preference, while differences are perceived in terms of copayment and price correction policies, which, consequently, interfere in the structuring of pharmaceutical services in their health systems.