Non-Communicable Disease Medicine Gap Study in Ghana

The study was conducted across six regions in Ghana. The regions included Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central, Bono East, Eastern and Northeast regions. We selected these regions based on their proportion of the total number of registered pharmacies and over-the-counter medicine sellers (OTCMS) in Ghana. Data on the location of all the registered pharmacies and over-the-counter medicine shops were obtained from the pharmacy council. This was a mixed-method cross-sectional study involving two components i.e., qualitative, and quantitative. Both primary and secondary data were collected simultaneously and subsequently triangulated to facilitate an appropriate interpretation of the overall results. Secondary data were collected from grey and published literature on the availability and accessibility of NCD medicines in Ghana. Primary data was collected through key informant interviews (KII) of purposively selected respondents whose roles were in the areas of regulation, service delivery, manufacturing, and policy/administration; and through survey of respondents in community and health facility pharmacies and OTCMs. Content and thematic analysis using NVivo V.14 was done for qualitative data after verbatim transcription and coding. Survey data was collected using Kobo Collect App version 2022.1.2 and later exported to Stata V.16.1 for data cleaning, processing, and analysis.