Kirsten Myhr

Kirsten Myhr (MScPharm, MPH), born 1947, is a Norwegian pharmacist, with a specialist degree in hospital pharmacy and a Master in Public Health. She has worked in university hospitals in Norway as head of the pharmacy department for almost 20 years, with pharmacovigilance at the regulatory authority in Norway and with medicine use in the Norwegian Board of Health. From 2001 to 2015 she worked at a regional medicines information and pharmacovigilance centre in Oslo (www.relis.no), most of the time as head of centre. She has been a HAI member for more than 35 years.

She has considerable international experience in pharmaceutical issues starting out as Principal Pharmacist at the Central Medical Stores in Botswana 1985-1988. Since then she has worked at UNICEF HQ in New York, short-term for WHO in Albania and Mongolia, and undertaken numerous consultancies in Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Since 2000 she has been engaged in the WHO/HAI project on developing a methodology for measuring medicine prices for which she was the principal author of the first edition of the manual, and later in activities arising from that. 2010-2011 she was vice-chair of the Affordable Medicines Facility malaria (AMFm) Ad Hoc Committee under the Global Fund for HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. She retired from full time work in 2016 but was the alternate representative for healthcare professionals in the European Medicine Agency’s committee for pharmacovigilance and risk management (PRAC) until early 2019.

Access to medicines has always been a priority issue and she has special experience in cancer medicines, in medicines to treat pain, in antibiotic use, and in ensuring rational drug use, particularly in the elderly.