Ministry improves access to medicine around the world
MONTREAL, QC�"For the past 20 years a Montreal-based ministry has been channeling medicine to needy areas around the world. Health Partners International of Canada (HPIC) is a non-profit relief and development organization working to increase access to medicine and improve health in the developing world.
“In the early days it focused more on relief work," says HPIC president Glen Shepherd. As it celebrates two decades of solid growth, HPIC is ramping up its disaster relief capacity and increasingly channeling its efforts into helping agencies in other countries develop better ways of managing their own medical supply.
This is a big deal. It's a very good thing to send a travel pack of medicines into an area with a visiting doctor. It's even better when a country can produce its own pharmaceuticals and manage their distribution safely and securely. It requires a great deal of infrastructure and expertise.
Many medicines must be refrigerated or stored in tightly controlled conditions and used in a timely manner in order to be safe and effective. It's one thing to send a bunch of pills overseas; it's quite another to see that it doesn't appear on a black market and that it is dispensed by medically knowledgeable people. HPIC has learned a lot about how to get this job done under adverse circumstances and earned the trust of many partner organizations, governments and pharmaceutical companies.
“We are trying to recognize the aspirations of people in the developing world," says Shepherd. “The kind of knowledge and information we have is in demand. But they need to be the masters of their own destiny."
Nowhere is this more evident than in Afghanistan, where a team of HPIC employees is engaged in a five-year, $10-million government funded project to help the war-torn country re-establish its pharmaceutical and medical supply system. They will be coordinating donated medicines, building a central warehouse and developing a quality control lab to make sure high quality medicines are available to the population.
Over the course of the project, HPIC will send some $25-million worth of priority medicines and medical supplies to Afghanistan. The specific emphasis is on getting needed supplies to women and children. Pharmaceutical companies in Canada donate most of the medicines. All of it must be fully market safe.
Haiti is another country where HPIC is currently concentrating. Because they have been active there since 1994, they were well-positioned to respond to overwhelming needs in the wake of the earthquake in January 2010, delivering more than $5-million worth of emergency medicines and medical supplies to its partners on the ground within the first six months. A further $8-million was slated to be delivered by the end of the year and HPIC is committed to long-term involvement.
“God loves the poor," says Shepherd. “We have the capacity to bring life-changing medicine to people who need it. Our mission is motivated by our faith and our work is our witness. We help people without discrimination."
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