Health sector experts have called for stronger governance of Jordan's national healthcare system and greater coordination among institutions, aiming to improve spending efficiency and ensure patients receive medicines and services on time and to the required standard.
اضافة اعلان
The calls were made at the launch conference of a policy paper titled "Towards a Patient-Centered Pharmaceutical System in Jordan: From Drug Availability to Ensuring Access," prepared by the Phoenix Center for Sustainable Development. Policymakers, experts, and representatives of official institutions, civil society, and the health sector attended.
The panel discussion featured Senator and former Director of the Jordan Food and Drug Administration Dr. Hayel Obeidat, Member of Parliament Dr. Shaher Shatnawi, former Secretary-General of the Ministry of Health Dr. Abdul Rahman Maani, and Member of the Jordan Medical Association Dr. Mohammad Tarawneh. The session was moderated by Farah Atiyat.
In opening remarks, Phoenix Center Director Ahmad Awad said ensuring patients' access to medicines - in the right quantity, quality, and time - is a fundamental element of the right to health and continuity of treatment. He said Jordan has a relatively advanced pharmaceutical system, but the challenge is closing the gap between drugs being available within the system and patients actually obtaining them, which requires an integrated management approach centred on patient needs.
Speakers said Jordan's healthcare system is among the more advanced in the region, supported by a strong institutional, medical, and pharmaceutical infrastructure spanning the public health sector, Royal Medical Services, university hospitals, and the private sector, as well as a sophisticated national pharmaceutical industry and specialised bodies for regulation, oversight, procurement, and supply.
Jordan allocates approximately 9 percent of its gross domestic product to healthcare - a relatively high share - yet outcomes in terms of service efficiency, quality, and accessibility fall short of what that level of investment should produce, speakers said.
The core problem, they said, lies in how resources are allocated and managed. Governance gaps weaken the system's ability to deliver results. Those gaps include a fragmented leadership structure, multiple decision-making centres, and limited coordination, integration, and information-sharing among healthcare providers.
This fragmentation can produce duplication of services and expenditure and leads to suboptimal use of available resources, speakers said. It also limits the system's capacity to function as an integrated whole centred on patient needs. They stressed the need for more effective coordination mechanisms across the sector's components, linking planning, financing, and service delivery within a single comprehensive vision.
Speakers said the pharmaceutical system is a fundamental part of the overall healthcare system, and that measuring success should not stop at counting hospitals, health centres, or budget sizes. The true measure, they said, is whether citizens can access care and medication at the right time and place.
The policy paper identified the core issue as not a generalised drug shortage, but a potential gap between a drug's presence within the system and its availability to the patient at the point of service. A medicine may be held in a central warehouse or listed under a procurement contract while a health centre experiences a temporary stockout, or a patient receives only part of their prescription.
The paper called for moving beyond a binary view of availability and adopting more precise indicators: the proportion of prescriptions dispensed in full, the number of days a medicine is unavailable at each facility, replenishment speed, instances of partial dispensing, and how often patients must return to a health centre or buy medicine from the private sector.
Participants also highlighted declining trust in primary healthcare, with patients increasingly bypassing health centres in favour of direct referral to hospitals. This has raised pressure and costs at higher levels of care, with hospitals absorbing cases that primary facilities could handle more efficiently and at lower cost.
They called for rebuilding confidence in health centres by expanding and improving services, ensuring adequate staffing, specialists, medicines, and diagnostic tests, and developing comprehensive health centres into facilities capable of managing a larger share of conditions - particularly chronic and non-communicable diseases - without hospital referral except where strictly necessary.
Strengthening primary care would ease pressure on hospitals, reduce patient waiting times and transport costs, and improve geographical equity in access to services, particularly in governorates and areas distant from major hospitals, speakers said.
The paper recommended developing a national drug-demand intelligence system in which needs estimates draw not only on quantities previously dispensed, but also on patient numbers, disease burden, demographic changes, unmet demand, and patient transfers between providers. It also called for electronic inventory systems to serve as early-warning tools for medicines at risk of running out, enabling redistribution of stock among facilities, linking procurement policy to supplier performance and supply continuity, protecting continuity of treatment for chronic conditions, and improving communication with patients about generic drugs and alternative treatments.
Closing the conference, participants said improving access to medicine requires better governance and integration of existing institutions, greater efficiency in resource use, and placing the patient and their health outcomes at the centre of planning and evaluation, so that the value of healthcare spending is directly linked to the services, treatment, and medicines citizens actually receive.
This article was originally written in Arabic for Al Ghad. It was translated into English with AI assistance and edited by Jordan News.
