2023-09-18 05:15:09
Published on September 18, 2023 at 7:15 am
The public hospital could be called to the rescue to support the manufacture of medicines in the event of shortages, assures the government at a time when the French can struggle to find the treatment prescribed to them in pharmacies.
“At the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, there is a huge pharmaceutical establishment […]I authorized them to produce medicines also to cope if there were shortages,” declared the Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, interviewed on Sud Radio at the beginning of September.
Today, the AP-HP pharmaceutical establishment can manufacture and use essential but unavailable medicines. Except for medicines for which one or more laboratories have marketing authorization. In this case, even if a drug runs out, the public pharmaceutical establishment cannot go to the front.
The experience of curares
The Covid crisis, however, has reshuffled the cards. Because faced with the dire need for curare for patients hospitalized in intensive care, the public authorities have granted an exemption to AP-HP to produce it in addition to that manufactured by manufacturers. It was first of all the pharmacies of certain university hospital centers which got involved. Subsequently, however, AP-HP used a French manufacturer to obtain larger quantities of the missing products.
The executive therefore decided to learn the lessons of this experience to strengthen its arsenal against drug shortages. Concretely, if a health crisis or industrial problems create supply disruptions, the Minister of Health or the Director General of the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM) may give the pharmaceutical establishment the opportunity to AP-HP to manufacture or coordinate the manufacture of the drugs in question, specify the Paris hospitals.
“Dismantling” of public production
These provisions echo the recommendations of the Senate commission of inquiry whose work was made public this summer. Denouncing “the dismantling of public production capacities” in terms of medicines, this commission recommended “restoring the manufacturing capacity” of the General Agency for Health Equipment and Products (Ageps), which oversees the pharmaceutical establishment of the AP-HP.
In 2018, the establishment made the choice to reduce its workforce and abandon the production of medicines to outsource it and concentrate on research. An approach particularly justified by the accumulation of regulatory constraints for small volume production.
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