Japanese MHW 1995 Budget Increases 3.4%

The Japanese government has approved a budget for the Ministry of Health and Welfare of 13,974.6 billion yen ($141.04 billion) for fiscal 1995, a rise of 3.4% on fiscal 1994. It agreed to nearly all the MHW's requests, notes Pharma Japan, with one proposal initially turned down by the Ministry of Finance, for 302 million yen ($3.04 million) to be used for the third-party evaluation of hospital functions, finally being approved after talks at director-general level.

Within this total, the annual budget for the Pharmaceutical Affairs Bureau has been raised 6% to 7.99 billion yen ($80.65 million). This includes a doubling of last year's allocation for the promotion of the rational use of drugs to 45 million yen; Pharma Japan says this is largely due to the wider availability of model hospital in-house drug information systems, whose numbers have now risen to six. Other allocations in the PAB's budget include:

- 3.13 billion yen for the support of R&D and the stable supply of pharmaceuticals - the same amount as last year;