Medicines for Europe members are major suppliers of medicines for health crises. During the COVID pandemic, up to 90% of medicines needed in intensive care units were off-patent medicines and our members have donated over 1200 truckloads of medicines to help Ukraine.
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Over the last two years, major crises have had dramatic impacts on patient population health across Europe. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the provision of primary care, cancer screening and treatment, care continuity, and elective surgery, impacting health outcomes of patients across Europe. The 2022 Health at a Glance Report, examined the key challenges to develop stronger, more resilient health systems following the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The added value of innovating on existing medicines may be in finding a new indication, by treating a different disease with the same medicine or treating a specific sub-population, improving efficacy of the treatment, being easier to tolerate, or improving overall adherence.
Medicines have a unique value to public health and society at large. They are vital for our wellbeing, either to manage serious conditions such as cancer, diabetes, bacterial infections, cardiovascular diseases, auto-immune conditions, or to prevent illness and manage symptoms that allow everyone to carry on with their lives.
Inflation across Europe has risen beyond 10%. This increases the manufacturing costs of essential, off patent medicines, which account for 70% of those dispensed in Europe. These medicines treat serious, debilitating conditions such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and auto-immune conditions.
The EU plans to update its 20-year-old pharmaceutical legislation early next year to improve access to medicines and to make innovation more affordable. The introduction of biosimilar medicines was one of the pioneering and most successful reforms of the previous legislation in 2004. Now we need to update the legislation to make it fit for the future. Open
Nurses in all health domains and specialities play a crucial role in the management of patients with serious noncommunicable diseases such as cancer, auto-immune conditions, and diabetes. The incidence of these diseases is increasing, and more patients require biological therapies to manage their condition.
Learn more in the ESNO guide Switch Management between Similar Biological Medicines
Listen to the third episode our Podcast: The Nurses’ voice on Biosimilar Medicines. An opportunity for Integrated Care
For the last decade, off-patent medicines, which represent the 70% of dispensed medicines in the European Union, have been subject to strict price regulation, budget austerity measures, and lowest-price tender rules, causing substantial price erosion and an unsustainable situation for manufacturers. This has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis and the war in Ukraine, which has dramatically increased general inflation (now over 9%), raw material costs (risen by between 50-160%), transportation costs (up to 500%) and energy prices.
Read the full Open Letter to EU energy Ministers
The Biosimilar medicines group, a Medicines for Europe sector group, is pleased to note the EMA/HMA jointly closing the discussion on biosimilar medicines interchangeability.
The statement reflects a harmonised view on today’s common clinical practice in many European Member States whereby prescribers and their patients can safely choose from all available authorised options of a given medicine and ‘without a patient experiencing any changes in the clinical effect’.