Kazakhstan's Health Minister Akmaral Alnazarova addressed the issue of Kazakh citizens purchasing medicines abroad — particularly in Turkey and Egypt — at a government briefing, infohub.kz reports.
Journalists drew the minister's attention to the fact that citizens buy medications during trips abroad, citing their lower cost, and asked why drugs are more expensive in Kazakhstan.
Alnazarova said the Health Ministry had carried out extensive work over the past three years to revise its drug pricing policy.
"Prices were significantly reduced in both the wholesale and retail segment and the single-distributor segment. At the end of 2023, the total savings of SK Pharmacy amounted to 23 billion tenge, and at the end of 2024 and 2025 it exceeded 125 billion tenge. This is one of the results of the pricing review," she said.
In addition, she said, procedures for registering foreign medicines in Kazakhstan are being simplified so that manufacturers of quality drugs from Turkey can enter the Kazakh market without obstacles and saturate it.
"This will ensure quality, range and competition. This work is also under way. We have introduced a significant portion of amendments in legislation to streamline all the necessary drug registration procedures. Whereas this procedure used to take from 2 to 5 years, today it takes effectively 15 working days for countries with a strong regulatory framework, and up to 100 working days in other cases. And today we are already seeing an increase in the range on the market," the head of the Health Ministry explained.
Earlier, at a government meeting, Alnazarova reported that as a result of these measures the number of registered medicines and medical devices had increased by 1,423 items compared with last year, reaching 22,000 items.