Barriers to access to medicines for non-communicable diseases for patients using the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS)

Inequalities in unmet need for health care services and medications in Brazil: a decomposition analysis

“…39 Moreover, the heavy concentration of unmet need for health care services in the North region may be also due to the difficulties involving the number of health professionals who choose to practice in this region, geographical accessibility to an SUS pharmacy, the poor infrastructure of the primary health care units, and difficulties with transportation of both health care teams and patients. 22,27,40 The results of our analysis also revealed that the unmet need for medications remained unchanged between 2013 and 2019 and that this finding was driven by an interplay between the socioeconomic and geographical disparities described above. In other words, while the unmet need for medications diminished somewhat among those who were comparatively wealthy, it increased among those who remain poor; these results ultimately offset one another.…”

“…39 Moreover, the heavy concentration of unmet need for health care services in the North region may be also due to the difficulties involving the number of health professionals who choose to practice in this region, geographical accessibility to an SUS pharmacy, the poor infrastructure of the primary health care units, and difficulties with transportation of both health care teams and patients. 22 , 27 , 40…”

“…By contrast, another more recent study focused on access to medicines through the public health system reported an increase in the proportion of people who did not obtain any medication from the public system between 2013 and 2019. 25 Other studies focused on unmet needs for specific health services (e.g., mental health, access to pharmaceuticals) and/or presented findings that were not limited to health care in Brazil 23 , 26 , 27 (see Appendix Table A1 for further details).…”

Factors associated with the use of a public information system of dentist-prescribed antibiotics in Minas Gerais, Brazil

“…There are some feasible explanations to that; first, since compliance with SIGAF is not compulsory less than half of the towns used this system. Also, for some reasons, such as lack of availability of the prescribed drug or the distance from the patient's house to the public pharmacy 30 , it is possible that after receiving a prescription some patients would rather purchase the medicines in a private drugstore, which might have directly impacted the overall number of prescribers in SIGAF records. The female predominance among prescribers is consistent with the literature, showing that Brazilian dentists are predominantly women in 92.59% of Brazilian states 31 .…”