Paediatric Clinical Pharmacology in the Former Soviet Union: Ukraine

Among the many challenges facing the newly created states formed in Eastern Europe and Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union is the development of medical education and health care independent of many of their former ties to Moscow. Ukraine, the largest of these states following the Russian Republic, is facing many of these challenges. Paediatric clinical pharmacology is markedly underdeveloped in the Ukraine. There is little clinical pharmacology content in undergraduate medical education and essentially none in postgraduate training. Underdevelopment of paediatric clinical pharmacology also increases difficulties faced because of lack of a domestic pharmaceutical industry. This situation compounds the difficulty of how physicians in Ukraine can best learn to choose and apply rational individualized therapy.