ISLAMABAD, Oct 1: The Supreme Court on Monday gave three months to the health ministry to work out a policy for rationalising drug prices and ensuring quality.

A three-member apex court bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry was hearing the issue of high prices of medicines, on a suo motu notice.

The Health ministry presented results of a drug price survey carried out on the orders of the Supreme Court issued at the previous hearing.

The survey, the first of its kind in the country, covered 42,000 brands of some 120 molecules being used in over 80 districts.

The health secretary said that the study had found huge differences in prices of generically the same medicines being sold by multi-national and local pharmaceutical companies.

Variation in prices of the more commonly used molecules being sold under different brands varied between 20 per cent and 400 per cent, whereas for lesser-used molecules, the difference was even larger, ranging between 100 per cent and 1,100 per cent.

Now that the ministry had got complete data about the pharmaceutical industry, the health secretary said, it was in a better position to frame a drug-pricing policy.

This, he said, would be done in consultation with different stakeholders, doctors, the pharmaceutical industry and provincial authorities.

He said the ministry would fix a bandwidth for each molecule and prices would have to be kept within that range.

Representatives of both Pharma Bureau (multinational companies) and Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (local pharmaceutical industry) have agreed to help the ministry in developing the policy.

Doctors’ inclination to prescribe costly medicines also came under discussion. The survey found that while prescribing doctors were influenced by brand loyalty, clinical experience, efficacy, marketing tactics of pharmaceutical companies and patients’ social and financial background.

The counsel for the Pharma Bureau said that his clients, who represented multi-national

companies, could assist in developing a code of conduct for doctors.