The lack of supply already affects more than 700 medicines

The pharmacists they suffer the lack of medicines directly to their clients, but they remember that they are at the end of the chain and do not have enough information to determine the causes. In it Barcelona College of Pharmaceutics (COFB) They have their own information system to find solutions. This is FarmaHelp, a tool that allows you to connect with nearby pharmacies to locate medicines. To date, FarmaHelp has 6,000 affiliated pharmacies, 1,148 in Catalonia, making it possible to locate more than 3,000 medicines each month.

Lourdes Aegean, a pharmacist, finds day-to-day difficulties when it comes to getting what is prescribed for her clients. She assures that the lack of antibiotics began to be noticed from September of last year and worsened at Christmas: “Right now, the situation is even worse. We have run out of options to request stock replacement from distributors,” she explains. she. In her case, she works with two distributors; Fedefarma and Cofares.

Sources from the distributors’ employers’ association, FedifarThey acknowledge that the situation is getting worse, but that, within the framework of logical competition, all the companies that distribute products to pharmacies have between a month and a month and a half of stock. The most relevant problems are registered in antibiotics of the type of Azithromycin and Augmentine in the last days. Sometimes it is difficult to find syrup in the pharmacy, but there is the equivalent in sachets, for example. In Fedifar they recognize the problem but they emphasize that “the majority of presentations with production difficulties have therapeutic alternatives. Of a total of more than 30,000 presentations, there have been supply problems in 789 in the last three months, so the incidence or repercussion of care is reduced,” they explain.

Laboratories

The distributors demand that the laboratories give preferential treatment to “full-range” firms to minimize stock-outs, which “give service to more than 22,000 pharmacies in Spain with criteria of equity between them.” Specific companies, both distributors and laboratories, tend to hide behind their employers when asking about the causes of supply failures. But all signs point to the labs as the main cause of the problems.

The Farmaindustria employer acknowledges the growing existence of supply problems, but categorically denies shortages. “The origin of this increase reflected by the AEMPS is multifactorial, which is why the laboratories have implemented contingency plans to minimize and prevent problems, which include higher safety stocks than at other times.”

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“In Spain, the situation is not serious and there is no health problem for the population, since the percentage of products without a therapeutic alternative is less than 1%. Despite this, the employers insist that guaranteeing the manufacture of strategic medicines in Spain it would improve the supply and give the country security in the face of future crises, one of the objectives of the Strategic Plan for the Pharmaceutical Industry 2023-2025”, they defend in farmaindustria.

Laboratories are taking measures to minimize the possibility of supply failures. Sources from Sanofi, for example, recognize the importance of the problem that, they say, affects “all agents involved in the supply chain: suppliers of raw materials (and their scarcity), manufacturers, transport, distributors, points of dispensation, health authorities…”. At Sanofi, they are carrying out initiatives to minimize stock breaks, especially the one they call Euroapi, which consists of the creation of an independent subsidiary that produces active ingredients, with six production centers for essential medicines in five European countries. Ensuring the supply of pharmaceutical raw materials is essential.

The causes

The laboratories ensure that there are technical problems, administrative causes, commercialization, parallel trade and seasonality. The latest incidents have been recorded due to a sudden increase in consumption in the case of antibiotics due to cold snaps. The technical problems cited by the companies are also circumstantial, such as a lack of raw materials. Administrative problems derive from the very characteristics of medicines as a product subject to high regulation. Any change in a drug must be notified three months in advance. The employers explain that, for example, a laboratory knew three months in advance that it was going to have a supply problem for two months due to the lack of a component in its packaging. However, he could not solve it and change the packaging because, if he requested administrative authorization to modify the presentation, the administrative green light would foreseeably not arrive until after six months, when the original problem would already be solved. A situation like this forces the supply to be suspended until the problem is solved without industrial alternatives.

Related news

He rising prices of raw materials It also causes supply interruptions. By having fixed prices, a rise in the cost of raw materials can make production unsustainable and they must be imported from countries with lower production costs, which increases foreign dependence and increases the probability of experiencing supply problems in the future.

The low price of certain medicines in Spain encourages wholesalers to selectively export products to other countries where prices are higher. This is a legal practice, although such exports must be notified to the Administration.