New website for the Pharmaceutical Forum: http://ec.europa.eu/pharmaforum/

The European Union is strongly committed to ensuring a high level of public health and innovation in the field of pharmaceuticals. In the context of medicines and treatments the key objectives are to guarantee access to medicines at an affordable cost, ensure that medicines are safe and effective, and improve the quality and dissemination of information to citizens to enable them to make informed choices about their own treatment. This needs to be balanced by supporting the competitiveness of the pharmaceutical industry to ensure that Europe continues to benefit from new medicines.

It has long been recognised that the European-based pharmaceutical industry plays a critical role in both the industrial and health sectors. It can make a major contribution to the goals set out by the Lisbon Strategy. However, a report on the competitiveness of the European-based pharmaceutical industry, commissioned by the European Commission, concluded that; “Europe is lagging behind [the USA] in its ability to generate, organise and sustain innovative processes that are increasingly expensive and organisationally complex.

The Council of Ministers, in its Conclusions on Medical Products and Public Health of 2000, underlined the importance of the identification of innovative medicines, with significant added therapeutic value, to the attainment of both industrial and public health sector goals. In this spirit a High Level Group on Innovation and the Provision of Medicines (called “G10 Medicines”), was set up by the Commission to take a fresh look at the problems facing the pharmaceutical sector. The G10 Group presented their report in May 2002. It set out a framework of 14 wide-ranging recommendations. Tracking these recommendations the Commission created the Pharmaceutical Forum in 2005 to take the process forward around three key themes: Information to patients on pharmaceuticals; pricing policy and relative effectiveness assessment.

The Pharmaceutical Forum is a high-level political platform for discussion supported by a Steering Committee and three expert Working Groups. The aim is to enhance the competitiveness of the pharmaceutical industry in terms of its contribution to social and public health objectives. The Forum brings together Ministers from all European Union Member States, representatives of the European Parliament, patients, the pharmaceutical industry, health care professionals, and insurance funds.

The Pharmaceutical Forum meets annually: the second Forum was held on 26 June 2007. Commission Vice-President Günter Verheugen and Commissioner Markos Kyprianou co-chaired the second ministerial-level Pharmaceutical Forum in Brussels. The meeting was attended by Health Ministers of Member States, MEPs and senior representatives from the Forum's ten stakeholder organisations.

This second Forum meeting acknowledged the work undertaken by the three working groups on Relative Effectiveness, Pricing and Reimbursement, and Information to Patients. There was widespread recognition of the challenges that each one was facing but acknowledgement that there had been some progress in all three. The Forum adopted a progress report which summarised the work of each of the working groups and set out objectives for the forthcoming year.

Pharmaceutical Forum Second Progress Report , 26th of June 2007
Joint ESIP and AIM Position Statement on Information to Patients on Diseases and Treatment Options , 26th of June 2007

The first Forum was held on 29 September 2006.