Shocking societal challenges such as COVID-19, antimicrobial resistance, and pollution are forcing Big Pharma to overwork to produce drugs to sustain the increased demand. Although this is for the good, current unsustainable systems are toothless against the disregard of the harm caused by pollution and environmental antimicrobial agents leaks that produce deadly superbugs. This calls for the exploration of new rationales and processes of policy making such as transformative innovation policy (TIP) that have potential alternative socio-technical systems in the domains of health, environment, and agriculture. Kenya is currently assessing its pharmaceutical system’s potential for transformative change.
Current solutions to the problem of antimicrobial resistance such as antimicrobial stewardship programmes (ASPs) and “One Health” promote aspects of multidisciplinary and system level impact. However, most of these solutions, especially in countries of the global south, including Kenya operate under broken pharmaceutical regulatory systems. TIP can help to address such system failures that prevent the processes of transformative change. The Kenyan project hopes to interrogate key failures such as lack of directionality, wrongly directed demand articulation, lack of policy coordination and reflexivity failure among others. In this expression of interest, we propose to have a 15-20 minutes presentation on the quality improvement of antimicrobial stewardship programmes in the global south as well as the viability of One Health concept, followed by 60 minutes panel discussion session on challenges and opportunities of achieving One Health (animal and human health, environmental health and food and agricultural health) through lens of TIP.
Ref: #27