Pharmaceutical distributors warn there are products with a one-year delay

The Association of Pharmaceutical Distributors warned this Wednesday of delays in placing products on the market, which in some cases could exceed a year, and defended the establishment of an early warning system for drug shortages.

In hearings on the “disruption of medicine” at the request of the Liberal Initiative (IL) party, the President of the Association of Pharmaceutical Distributors (Adifa), Nuno Flora, advocated the need for a “colossal improvement” in the information management system in this area.

The official said that there are several administrative and regulatory procedures, but they are not integrated, citing the list for advance notification, the list for the temporary suspension of exports, and the list of essential medicines, the order of which has been published, as examples. in January.

In addition, only the enterprises themselves, the pharmaceutical industry, pharmacies and pharmaceutical distributors know their “reserves”.

“We should have a national system for early warning of failures and failures” in order to know situations in advance and not act “casuistically”.

To this end, he defended, “everything should be integrated in terms of information management in Infarmed”, which is the regulator and controller in this area.

The president of Adifa also warned of delays in placing products on the market due to production problems and “a certain trend seen in recent years in the de-industrialization of the pharmaceutical sector at the European as well as the national level.”

In addition to this situation, there was a pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, which created not only production, but the rest of the drug supply chain, “a lot of pressure and made it very difficult not only to access the product.” but also in terms of time to market.”

“We may have had products that didn’t arrive four or five months ago, today we have products that arrive a year or more later,” he stressed.

Nuno Flora warned that supply chains are “very fragile and need support”, expressing regret that the distribution sector has not received any support from the state or other organization during this period to cope with increased costs.

“Our calculations for this year, unfortunately, with inflation are much more serious than what we warned about in May and June at the end of the year. It will certainly be somewhere around six to seven million euros in terms of costs associated with increased inflation,” he stressed.

Regarding the lack of medicines, Nuno Flora said that this is a problem that “certainly exists for more than 10-15 years” and that “it is not exclusive to the country.”

The person in charge said that, contrary to what was thought, exports are not the cause of the problem, not least because they are declining in the medical sector.

According to Infarmed, in the first 10 months of 2022, the export of about 1.7 million packages of medicines was banned.

“Our market last year was 323 million packs (…) Therefore, this is not the problem. [exportação] when our market lacks from 8% to 10% of drugs,” he said.

Referring to a 5% increase for medicines priced up to €10 and a 2% increase for medicines priced between €10 and €15, Nuno Flora said that this is the “first sign” of what the country can do at this level to “make the market more attractive.”

“It must be a path that cannot end here (…) even because inflation itself eats up this increase,” he said, however, acknowledging that this is the first increase in drug prices, in particular, in 20 years.