Last Saturday, Consumer Rights Day was commemorated around the world. Our rights as consumers were highlighted while market abuses and injustices which undermine these rights were emphasized.

There is no other area more important to all consumers than that of health and medicine. Good health is crucial to every human being and, thus, medicines are not regarded as ordinary items of commerce. Access to medical treatment is heavily dependent on the availability of affordable medicines.

Quality of life also depends on the prices of medicinal products.

The World Health Organisation stresses that “sustainable and efficient financing of medicines and affordable prices are essential to ensuring access to medicines and are two of the building blocks in the WHO Access to Medicines Framework”.

According to the WHO recommendations, medicinal suppliers have a duty to cooperate in ensuring that their products are available on the market at a fair and reasonable price and that access should not be denied.

The government is working on ways to ensure that people have access to the medicines they need. Attempts made by the previous government to reduce medicine prices were not sustainable. We are now seeing that, perhaps in its enthusiasm to score political brownie points, the Opposition is suggesting the government ought to resort to the antics it used when in government. It had then resorted to haphazard damage limitation price-cutting exercises with the aim of assuaging the votes haemorrhage it was experiencing.

It seems the Opposition is suggesting that the government should blindly repeat the previous government’s exercise in the area of medicine pricing without addressing the real issues in a sustainable manner. This notwithstanding that it took the previous government many years to start tackling this issue, albeit randomly.

Action taken during the previous legislature included pharmaceutical distributors being coerced into reducing the price of some medicines, regardless of how useful these were. What was of the essence was the quantity not the quality. The important thing was to have a long list of medicines even if many of them were of no significance. And, by the way, the price of Augmentin went down because there was a worldwide price reduction of this product at the time.

Most people were not impressed by this game of quantities and did not take the bait.

What is worse though was the false commitment to make gold standard treatments available to the patients by the introduction of new medicines in the hospital formulary, which would sustain the viability of the pharmaceutical distribution system.

By so upgrading the availability of medicines, one would not only improve the quality of life of people but also reduce the long-term costs of healthcare in general.

Of course, what was not done in decades cannot be done overnight. It would be easy to address the price of medicines challenge spasmodically but we do not think that is the way to deal with the problem.

Apart from the possible sustainable solutions being explored and worked upon, a recommendation by the WHO guidelines on country pharmaceutical pricing policies is also worth considering. It proposes the education of consumers on how to get the best benefits from medicine without compromising quality. One such recommendation is to encourage the use of generic (and, thus, lower cost) products among prescribers and dispensers. Consumers should be taught to enquire about the availability of generics.

All medicines, whether reference or generic, conform to the established standards of quality, safety and efficacy

All medicines, whether reference or generic, conform to the established standards of quality, safety and efficacy and they can only be placed on the market in Malta after authorisation is granted.

The hill in this field is rather steep but surmountable. One only has to know what went on during meetings of the working committee on the pricing of medicinal products set up in 2007 to understand how frustrating it must have been for the government to find itself most of the time running on the spot.

You had members walking out, rightly so, every time a fellow member - undergoing criminal proceedings in cases directly related to the terms of reference of the said committee - was present. This person was presented again on the committee six years later after the change in government in 2013, to the same effect and was thus removed.

There were situations whereby the minister declared that since no collaboration was forthcoming from importers, the government was left with no choice other than to present the law on mandatory pricing in Parliament.

Promises were made by the government that it would allocate €6 million for the inclusion of innovative drugs in the formulary. This never materialized either, as happened with the so-called ‘agreement’ that was not even endorsed by main stakeholders.

This is the chequered recent history in the area of medicine pricing. While seeking solutions, this government will not comprise responsibility for quick PR fixes and shall refrain from making empty promises.

We will continue to work for a sustainable and fair solution.

Helena Dalli is Minister for Social Dialogue, Consumer Affairs and Civil Liberties.