Utrecht Award for dr. Suzanne Hill, World Health Organization

On june 22 2018, dr. Sue Hill received the Utrecht University Award for Excellence in Pharmacy Practice 2018. 

Every second year the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Utrecht University recognizes the contribution and leadership of an individual in the area of pharmacy practice by awarding the Excellence in Pharmacy Practice award. As Centre for Pharmaceutical Policy and Regulation, based at this department within the Pharmacoepidemiology & Clinical Pharmacology group, we nominated Dr. Suzanne (Sue) Hill for this award. We are happy and proud that the selection committee decided to select her this year for this prize.

Dr. Hill was trained as a pharmacologist and public health physician and contributed significantly to the field of pharmaceutical policy during the course of her career. As an academic at the University of Newcastle, Australia, she was among the pioneers who started using the concepts of pharmacoeconomics and HTA in managing medicines selection and medicines reimbursement schemes. As a Secretary to the WHO Expert Committee on Essential Medicines, she injected a heavy dose of evidence based medicine into the methodology and introduced pharmacoeconomics and HTA here as well. She learned the meaning of policy and politics during her time as the Chair of the Pharmaceutical Benefit Committee in Australia. Currently, as Director of the Essential Medicines and Health Products Department of WHO, she is responsible for setting norms and standards and provide technical support and guidance to governments all over the world to ensure and enhance access to medicines in the interest of patients.

It is in this area of systems therapeutics where Sue really made a difference by championing over the last decades evidence based practices in the field of pharmaceutical policy and regulatory decision making. Not as a desk (only) person but as someone with roots in the field. We would like to congratulate Sue with this award and look forward to continuous collaborations between the EMP department at WHO and our Centre of Pharmaceutical Policy and Regulation.