The Quality Use of Medicines:\ud Serving Health and Economic Objectives?*

The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on the issues to be discussed at the National Medicines Policy Partnerships Workshop, into, that discussion. A major theme of the paper is that there is an urgent need, in the interests of better health outcomes for\ud the Australian people, to transcend the current environment of crisis and conflict linked\ud to cost containment in medicines policy. One key to this is a real focus on the quality\ud use of medicines (QUM) ensuring that all Australians get all of those cost effective\ud medicines, and only those medicines, necessary for the best available health outcomes