Countries in the ASEAN region persistently face several crucial challenges to ensure continuous access to medicines for the population. These include disruptions in the availability of some essential medicines including those needed to treat infectious diseases. These medicines are often claimed to be ‘non-commercially viable’ to manufacture, hence are not produced due to the low demand resulting to inaccessibility. As these medicines are essential for treatments, when supply is disrupted, the ASEAN Member States (AMS) have to look for alternative sources, usually forced to pay higher prices and sometimes have to accept products of poor quality. In the case of life-saving medicines and orphan medicines, due to the limited demand, the cost of these medicines could be very high and vary widely among AMS. This could also be the case for new life-saving patented medicines.

Fundamentally, ensuring access to essential medicines is a key objective of all health systems and is an integral component of the progress towards universal health coverage (UHC). Despite global and national efforts to improve access and affordability of medicines, millions of people, in particular from low- and middle-income countries, still remain without full access to quality-assured and affordable medicines. The ASEAN Post-2015 Health Development Agenda1 is an initiative to achieve a healthy, caring and sustainable ASEAN community by clustering and goal setting health priorities into four clusters. The health clusters highlight different health priority issues which are promoting healthy lifestyle, responding to hazards and emerging threats, strengthening health system and access to care and ensuring food safety