Following approval by its members on Friday 19 April 2002, the report of the meeting of Expert Committee was approved for publication by the Director-General and posted on the WHO web site on Monday 22 April, just ten working hours after the meeting had closed. The rapid dissemination of the meeting report, together with the revised version of Model List and the summary of recommendations was widely appreciated, especially in view of the important recommendations the Committee had made on the selection of essential medicines for the treatment of HIV/AIDS and malaria.

Within weeks of the meeting, the 12th Model List (including the introductory text and explanatory notes) had been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish and posted on the WHO web site. These web pages in the six official languages of WHO were also disseminated in large numbers as hard copy. During the remainder of 2002, the full report was edited for formal publication in the WHO Technical Report Series. However, the amount of work involved in separating the Model List into core and complementary lists and introducing the ATC classification for all items on the Model List meant that the meeting report was not published in final form until early 2003. In January 2003, a summary of the Committee's report and a statement on its public health implications were submitted to the WHO Executive Board. The 12th Model List was also incorporated into the WHO Essential Medicines Library (see section 3.7).

It was noted that changes in the name of the Expert Committee since its inception in 1977 had given rise to some confusion over the numbering of the various Committees and their corresponding meeting reports. For the sake of clarity, it was decided that the practice of numbering the meetings of the Committee should be abandoned in favour of referring simply to the number of the Model List.