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New Delhi: The Union health ministry has asked the National Medical Commission (NMC) to modify the Registered Medical Practitioner (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 2023 issued earlier this month which, among other changes, introduced a provision to penalise doctors for failure to prescribe generic drugs, ThePrint has learnt...
The RMP (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 2023, state that every registered medical practitioner should prescribe drugs using generic names written legibly and prescribe drugs rationally, avoiding unnecessary medications and irrational fixed-dose combination tablets.. Further, the regulations ask doctors to avoid prescribing branded generic drugs and to encourage patients to purchase drugs either from Jan Aushadhi Kendras the 9,303 stores set up by the Centre or from other generic pharmacy outlets...
A second ministry official said, The NMC has been asked to make changes in the regulations on various issues, including the clause involving generic drugs, and we have asked them to allow doctors to at least prescribe branded generics...
The NMC, explaining its reason for asking doctors to prescribe generics, has said that Indias out-of-pocket spending on medication accounts for a major proportion of public spending on healthcare.. Further, generic medicine are 30 to 80 percent cheaper than branded drugs..
But national drug surveys done on thousands of samples collected from retail chemists across India and subjected to lakhs of tests have repeatedly shown that, during the last 10 years, the proportion of not standard quality or NSQ medicine is less than 5 percent, he said.. Advocating for this number to be brought down to almost zero, Phadke said that, in the absence of this quality assurance, the narrative that only branded medicine have assured quality has acquired some credibility because the Indian drug regulatory system doesnt ensure that all medicines in the market, irrespective of company, are of assured quality...
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