OBJECTIVES:

In the past decades, economic sanctions have been frequently used on a worldwide scale for political intentions. Economic sanctions not only cause economic problems for the country which is the subject of the sanction, but also cause many other problems in other sanctions such as health. For example, the recent international sanctions against Iran, resulted in many pharmaceutical shortage due to financial barriers restricted the procurement of medicines. However, there are short-cuts and solutions in the case of medicine shortages. So, Iran was highly successful to maintain its quality of the pharmaceutical services by applying economic resilience strategy.

METHODS:

This paper, by reviewing historical data, aimed to evaluate the IFDA strategy in handling crisis during sanctions and recommended successful polices, which could improve access to medicines in such a situation. These policies may be also recommended to other countries in such a situation as effective solutions for today’s vulnerable economics situations.

RESULTS:

While, the crisis reached its peak in 2012, to reduce the negative impact of the sanctions, some changes were proposed by the IFDA at different policymaking levels from parliament legislation to organizational procedures. Significant price reduction, decreasing market share of imported medicines, facilitating domestic manufacturing, attracting foreign investment for domestic manufacturing, managing drug shortages, and increasing financial protection of patients in general and patients with catastrophic payments in particular were the main achievements of the new strategy of the IFDA, leading to better accessibility and availability in the country.

CONCLUSIONS:

Iran’s experiences on the boost of domestic manufacturing and cost containment approaches so that it withstood and recovered pharmaceutical sector from negative impacts of the sanctions, while the health system was shocked by the international sanctions, could be a successful example of economic resilience strategies.