Associations between essential medicines and health outcomes for cardiovascular disease

BACKGROUND: National essential medicines lists are used to guide medicine reimbursement and public sector medicine procurement for many countries therefore medicine listings may impact health outcomes. METHODS: Countries’ national essential medicines lists were scored on whether they listed proven medicines for ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease and hypertensive heart disease. In this cross sectional study linear regression was used to measure the association between countries’ medicine coverage scores and healthcare access and quality scores. RESULTS: There was an association between healthcare access and quality scores and health expenditure for ischemic heart disease (p ≤ 0.001), cerebrovascular disease (p ≤ 0.001) and hypertensive heart disease (p ≤ 0.001). However, there was no association between medicine coverage scores and healthcare access and quality scores for ischemic heart disease (p = 0.252), cerebrovascular disease (p = 0.194) and hypertensive heart disease (p = 0.209) when country characteristics were accounted for. CONCLUSIONS: Listing more medicines on national essential medicines lists may only be one factor in reducing mortality from cardiovascular disease and improving healthcare access and quality scores. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12872-021-01955-1.