Conference Pharmaceutical Forum - delivering for the patients
25 March 2009, Brussels

  Streaming video & Conference Report  

Photos of the conference soon available

    


The Pharmaceutical Forum was set up in 2005 as a three year process by Vice-President Verheugen and former Commissioner Kyprianou, in order to find relevant solutions to public health considerations regarding pharmaceuticals, while ensuring the competitiveness of the industry and the sustainability of the national health-care systems.

In its Conclusions on Medical Products and Public Health of 2000, the Council of Ministers underlined the importance of identifying innovative medicines with significant added therapeutic value to attain both industrial and public health sector goals. In this spirit, a High Level Group on Innovation and 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 its report in May 2002 in which it set out 14 wide-ranging recommendations. In 2003, the European Commission published the Communication “a stronger European-based pharmaceutical industry for the benefit of the patient – a call for action” in response to the G10 Group’s Recommendations (COM (2003) 383). In order to tackle some of 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.

Commissioner Vassiliou and Vice-President Verheugen co-chaired on 2 October 2008 the final ministerial-level Pharmaceutical Forum. The meeting was attended by Health Ministers of Member States, MEPs, EFTAs Secretary General and senior representatives from the Forum's ten stakeholder organisations.

The Pharmaceutical Forum adopted the following conclusions and recommendations pdf - 67 KB [67 KB]

Press Release: EN pdf - 94 KB [94 KB] Deutsch (de) français (fr)

Access to the reference documents can be found under the respective themes of information to patients, pricing and reimbursement and relative effectiveness (please click on the themes on the top of the page). A version of the final conclusions and recommendations with most reference documents are also available here pdf - 956 KB [956 KB]
A brochure of the final conclusions and recommendations is available here pdf - 3 MB [3 MB]