Chairperson
Dr Pietro Folino Gallo
Italian Medicines Agency
via della Sierra Nevada, 60
00144 Rome
Italy
Telephone : +390659784737
Email : p.folino@aifa.gov.it

One hundred thousand medicinal products are licensed in the European countries and tons of medicines are daily used with a yearly expenditure wider than 100 billion euro. The reasons for creating this EUPHA section on utilisation of medicines were :

• medicines have a wide impact on public health
• medicines can adversely affect public health because of medicine related problems
• medicines related problems are an important cause of mortality and most of them can be prevented
• there is an important economic burden of medicines on health systems
• medicines are able, via the wastewater, to pollute the environment, including drinking water. Several medicines have endocrine-disrupters or carcinogenic properties.
• there are wide discrepancies between European countries in both licensed medicines and in their utilisation and expenditure
• there is a need for re-orienting European pharmaceutical policy from an industry-based to a public health-based approach

The aims of this section are:

• to increase awareness and spread knowledge on the impact of medicine utilisation on public health
• to promote European harmonised data collection about licensed medicines, their prices, utilisation and expenditure
• to develop indicators for monitoring price, utilisation and expenditure of medicines at a European level
• to promote benchmarking exercise on utilisation of medicines at national and regional level
• to assess the outcome of medicine utilisation linking pharmacoepidemiological data to morbidity-mortality data
• to develop a public health-oriented European database of the licensed medicines with relevant information about their best use

The EUPHA section on the utilisation of medicines is presided by Dr. Pietro Folino-Gallo from the Italian Medicines Agency, Rome, Italy and Professor Arne Melander from the NEPI Foundation and Malmo University Hospital, Sweden. The section currently has 150 members. Members of the section are also involved in two European Union-funded projects: EURO-MED-STAT and PPRI. EURO-MED-STAT is a project devoted to build a database of medicines available in Europe with information on their price, utilisation and expenditure. Moreover an inventory of the e-prescribing database in European countries is ongoing with the aim to evaluate the possibility to pool together data from the inventoried sources in a “European Primary Care Database”. The PPRI project aims to produce a country profile, according to an established template, for each participating country.

In 2006, the section has contributed to the publication of two special issues of the Italian Journal of Public Health: the first one devoted to medical errors, with special regard to medication errors and safety; the second one devoted to medicine utilisation and public health.
By its members the section is present in several EU activities including the Working party on health care systems (DG Public Health) and the Working Group on pricing of the Pharmaceutical Forum (DG Industry).