A review of pharmaceutical scheduling processes in six countries and the effect on consumer access to medicines
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective This analysis determined and compared pharmaceutical scheduling arrangements in six selected countries and explored how these different scheduling arrangements affect the availability of medicines to the public for self-medication. Method A comparison of the pharmaceutical scheduling requirements for medicines in six countries was undertaken in September 2003. The six countries of comparison were Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand (NZ), the United States (US), and the United Kingdom (UK). The World Self-Medication Industry website, in September 2003, listed 216 medicines available in 27 countries. Of these, 104 medicines were available in each of the six countries selected for the study. As different scheduling arrangements pertain to different forms (external, internal) or doses and pack sizes, the total number of medicines and medicine forms for comparison was 119. The scheduling of each of the 119 products was determined and compared across the six countries. Results Of the 119 medicines and medicine forms available, Australia and NZ have 38 and 34 ‘prescription-only’ medicines and 81 and 85 medicines available without a prescription respectively. UK, Canada and France have 47, 53, and 55 ‘prescription-only’ medicines and 72, 66 and 64 medicines available without a prescription. US, which has only two schedules, ‘prescription-only’ and ‘general sale’, has the highest number of ‘prescription-only’ drugs (66) and the least number of medicines available without a prescription (53). Conclusion The results indicate that there is a tendency for more products to be made available without a prescription in countries that have schedules with pharmacy involvement (Australia, NZ, Canada, France and UK) and a matching tendency for preparations to be held in ‘prescription-only’ schedules in the USA where ‘pharmacy-only’ schedules do not exist. The presence of ‘pharmacy-only’ schedules provides a structure whereby greater consumer access to medication is available.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it