International Health Policy Program, Ministry of Public Health, Nonthaburi 11000, Thailand.
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom 73170, Thailand.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Nov 7;18(21):11692. doi: 10.3390/ijerph182111692.
International trade has become more complicated and is now related to more aspects of health and the health system. As Thailand is active in international trade and health, understanding what knowledge exists and determining the knowledge gap is essential for generating the necessary evidence in order to promote better understanding and allow evidence-based policy decisions to be made. This study reviewed the existence of knowledge on international trade and health issues in a scoping review, focusing on Thailand during the period 1991-2020. In total, 156 studies from seven databases and manual searching were included. Of these, 46% were related to trade in health services and 39% were linked to intellectual property, particularly access to medicines. This review found only a very small amount of research on other issues and did not identify any study on trade policies or products related to health and international trade and the environment. We therefore recommend that further studies should be carried out to provide more critical evidence-in particular, more research focusing on the impacts of trade on health-related goods and the analysis of the positive and negative impacts of international trade on industry is needed. Furthermore, better knowledge management through the publication of research findings and making them searchable on international databases will increase the visibility of international trade, increase our knowledge of health issues, and provide supporting evidence.
国际贸易变得更加复杂，现在与健康和卫生系统的更多方面相关。由于泰国积极参与国际贸易和卫生领域，了解现有知识并确定知识差距对于生成必要的证据至关重要，以便促进更好的理解并允许基于证据的政策决策。本研究通过范围综述回顾了 1991-2020 年期间泰国国际贸易和卫生问题方面的知识现状，共纳入来自 7 个数据库和手动搜索的 156 项研究。其中，46%的研究与卫生服务贸易有关，39%的研究与知识产权有关，特别是药品可及性。本综述发现，关于其他问题的研究非常少，也没有发现任何关于贸易政策或与卫生和国际贸易与环境相关产品的研究。因此，我们建议应开展进一步的研究，以提供更具批判性的证据——特别是，需要更多关注贸易对与健康相关商品的影响的研究，以及分析国际贸易对产业的正反两方面影响的研究。此外，通过发表研究成果并使其在国际数据库中可搜索，更好地进行知识管理，将提高国际贸易的可见度，增加我们对卫生问题的了解，并提供支持性证据。
