- Lack of Awareness Among Healthcare Providers. Despite being the first line of defense, most HCPs receive little to no training on identifying counterfeit or substandard medicines, which puts patient safety at risk.
- Online Pharmacies Pose Significant Dangers. While more consumers and even HCPs are turning to online pharmacies for convenience or cost reasons, about 95% of these sites are illegal or unsafe, contributing to the spread of counterfeit medicines.
- Education and Advocacy Are Critical. Industry efforts such as the BESAFE project and global pharmacy curriculum initiatives are essential to increase awareness, improve training, and ensure safer medication practices across healthcare systems.
A global security leader I know often talks about the importance of raising awareness, not alarm, regarding the threat and risk of counterfeit and illicit medicines. The last thing you would want, he says, is to have someone fear taking their medication because they read, for example, a commonly cited statistic such as, “World police agency Interpol says more than one million people die each year from counterfeit drugs…”1 That is scary.
Certainly, we don’t want to stoke fear, but the awareness aspect is critical, even though the risk may be low, generally speaking. It’s important as a consumer and vital as a healthcare provider (HCP) to know the basic telltale signs of a fake, along with the simple precautions people can take to ensure they are getting genuine, safe, and effective medicine. It can truly mean life or death.
But do they know? Are they aware?
Flipping the security leader’s point around, what we should be raising the alarm about, as an industry, is the serious lack of awareness on this issue, especially among HCPs, and specifically when it comes to purchasing drugs online. HCPs—doctors, nurses, and pharmacists—are a critical first line of defense in our fight against counterfeit medicines. In numerous counterfeit investigations that I’ve had experience with, an HCP has been the one who recognized that something was “off” with a product and reported it through quality complaint channels, which led to appropriate actions being taken.
HCPs are also in a position to advise patients of appropriate precautions to take when acquiring their medicines.
I first got the sense that awareness among HCPs was not what it should be when, a few years back, I met the head of professional education for all nurses of a major European healthcare system. She told me that nurses there received no formal education or training on the topic of counterfeit and illicit drugs. Then, recently, I read a report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health2 that highlighted the knowledge gap that exists among HCPs in the US regarding this issue. The data point that caught my attention was that “Only 2% of HCPs are trained to identify substandard and falsified (SF) [i.e., counterfeit] drugs and counsel patients about safe prescription acquisition procedures.” The report also cited a survey that indicated that “more than 80% of US HCPs do not consider SF drugs a serious concern.”
