The Third International Conference for Improving Use of Medicines (ICIUM_2011) will be held in Alexandria, Egypt, 10-14 April, 2011, under the sponsorship of WHO and a consortium of international organizations.

ICIUM conferences are highly interactive, limited attendance meetings that are held every 7 years to: (1) build an international consensus on designing and sustaining effective interventions to improve medicine use; and (2) define a new global research agenda on improving medicines use that is relevant to current conditions and unfolding developments in global health. They bring together a select group of about 500 experts on medicines issues from over 80 countries and are truly unique milestones in the medicines field.

ICIUM_2011 (www.icium2011.org ) focuses on the impacts of interventions, programs, and policies on use of medicines in low and middle-income countries. In each of eight major topic areas (access; policy; economics; chronic care; child health; HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis; malaria; and drug resistance), research on medicines issues at the international, regional, national, institutional, provider, and patient levels is of interest; throughout the conference, gender equity and information technology with respect to medicines will be discussed. The ICIUM_2011 Call for Abstracts (www.inrud.org/ICIUM/Call-for-Abstracts.cfm) describes topics of interest in detail.

One of the outcomes of ICIUM_2004 was the Medicines and Insurance Coverage (MedIC) Initiative which has begun to contribute research on medicines questions in health insurance systems.With the focus on universal coverage across the world, evidence to inform insurance medicines policy decision making in low and middle income countries is increasingly important. Participants at ICIUM_2011 will seek to generate policy and research recommendations for sound insurance medicines coverage, based on existing evidence. We invite you to submit research on medicines policies in health insurance systems to the conference; please feel free to share this call for abstracts with colleagues who are working on insurance medicines policies.

Abstracts should be submitted by December 14, 2010 (www.conftool.com/icium2011/). Since the intent of ICIUM_2011 is to help shape evidence-based policy recommendations and a future
research agenda, both ongoing and recently published work may be submitted. A limited number of scholarships may be available to support authors of accepted abstracts to participate in the conference.

The ICIUM _2011 Scientific Program Committee is looking forward to receiving your work on this important topic and to seeing you in Alexandria!