Latin America committed to providing improved health services
Coountries in the Americas—including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, United States, and Venezuela—signed an agreement on health ethics in the 2017 Conference on compliance in Latin America, Bogotá with Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed).
At the Conference, the medical device associations created a document implementing medtech codes of ethics for governing the medical technology market, including responsibility to people’s lives and health, integrity, independence, transparency, sincere interest, and accountability.
The formally launched document by the inter-American coalition on ethical business practices in the medical technology sector promises to have good organizational practices and not to misuse the resources. The medical technology sectors of respective countries aim to increase access and coverage along with decreasing expenses and improving service delivery to patients.
An annual review of the established principles will be organized to verify that the signatory countries comply with the policies. The “Bogotá Principles” set by the inter-American coalition’s is an expansion of “Kuala Lumpur Principles” signed in by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies’ respective medical technology sectors for implementing the voluntary codes of ethics.
This initiative aims to highlight the importance high-standard ethical business practices among medical technology manufacturers, distributors, and health care professionals. According to Secretary for Transparency of Columbia, Camilo Enciso, ” Episodes that have known to the public recently, are marking the need to move faster to prevent acts of corruption in a forceful way, training officials, generating channels of denunciation, modernizing codes of ethics and working on self-regulation pacts.”
