Popular Pharmacy Program of Brazil: a political analysis of its origin, unfoldings and inflections

Abstract

The article refers to a qualitative research that analyzes the origins, unfoldings, results and  challenges of the Brazilian Popular Pharmacy  Program, in view of the necessary integrality of  pharmaceutical assistance. For the production of the  data, documents and semi-structured interviews were used with informants involved with the Brazilian Health Reform movement and the issue of  medicines/pharmaceutical assistance, considering the  period from 2003 to 2016; news produced between  2013 to 2018, available on electronic sites of  institutions understood as actors in the process of  implementing pharmaceutical policies. Analysis of the data revealed that, despite the conflicts surrounding  the proposal’s construction, the program resulted in  increased access to essential drugs, reduced mortality  and hospitalizations for chronic diseases. For this  reason, inflections in the program, such as the closing  of the first modality, have resulted in positions of civil  society organizations, also motivated by the  conjuncture of losses of social rights. Gaps remain  regarding the quality of access in its various  dimensions of analysis and the promotion of rational  use of medicines, from the perspective of the  integrality of Pharmaceutical Assistance.