The switch to public procurement in line with the national list of essential medicines would list the problem of making up lists of medicines, Deputy Health Minister of Ukraine Olha Stefanishyna has said.

"I hope it would be soon. Ukraine would switch to the use of the national list of medicines for national procurement, and there would not be so many changes in the lists of medicines as it is done now. The lists would be changed only to meet recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) when new medicines appear. This would be the right system," she said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

Stefanishyna said that at present, the system of making up the list of procurement in Ukraine is old and ineffective. "We are changing it now," she said.

"Now everything is done as in older times: there are commissions creating lists, which every year draw up draft lists. Then these lists are discussed in public and eventually approved. Now the Health Ministry is designing a draft government resolution that approves the list of medicines and INN [international nonproprietary names] depending on the dose, form of production and their number. This is a large piece of information and it takes long time to approve it," she said.

Stefanishyna also said that there is a problem of the absence patient registers for determining the medicine needs. .

"There are methods of the international organization that takes into account the birth rate. In 2018, we want to change the calculation method and we want to start with vaccines," she said.