Accessing The Pharmaceutical And Medical Device Markets In Myanmar

When Myanmar opened to the West, one of the first sectors multinationals were most excited to pursue was the healthcare market. Because of the country’s internally forced exile from the world’s stage, Myanmar’s healthcare system has long been starved of western pharmaceuticals, medical devices and diagnostic equipment. Currently, Myanmar’s government-supported public healthcare provides basic care and some acute disease management; however, the little bit of capacity that is available is sporadic. For the last several decades, the WHO, UN and various NGOs have all made up the difference between what a functioning public healthcare system should have been able to provide – in particular with respect to communicable diseases – and what little the government system was actually capable of delivering. Historically, Myanmar’s government has spent approximately 2% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare; impoverished Laos spends 4.5% and Cambodia 5.6%.  As a result of Myanmar’s inadequate spending on healthcare, the WHO ranked Myanmar’s healthcare system dead last out of the 190 countries ranked with respect to “overall health system performance.”
Source: Forbes.com Healthcare News - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news