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The Businessmen’s Circle presents a report with recommendations to strengthen the health sector as a strategic asset for our country
The document demands that the Administration support the pharmaceutical industry as an economic engine in terms of investment in research, employment and production
«Health is a sector that meets all the conditions to boost economic growth, attract talent, generate synergies and promote Spain on the international scene. And it is possible to achieve this by counting on the commitment and consensus of the actors involved to apply the best management practices of available resources in the health Administration, and create the conditions for the private health sector to develop its maximum potential».
This is the initial approach of the document Spain, a country of health excellence, which was presented this Wednesday in Madrid by the Círculo de Empresarios
-independent Spanish association for the promotion of private initiative-, in which it proposes solutions and measures to intensify the quality, efficiency and sustainability of the National Health System (SNS).
Among these proposals for improvement, it is worth highlighting the promotion of clinical research and the manufacture of medicines, the reinforcement of public-private collaboration and the commitment to digitization. After the pandemic, the SNS has shown its “vulnerability” and is in need of “urgent structural reforms” to guarantee equity between citizens and territories and build a leading strategy in advanced therapies and innovative drugs, the authors explain.
Regarding the first of the solutions, the document recalls that the pharmaceutical industry is responsible for 8% of all investment in R&D in Spain (19% if we talk about industrial R&D) with an annual investment of 1,200 million euros. euros and that our country has a leading role, since it participates in three out of every ten clinical trials that are launched in Europe.
An excellent starting point
“The starting point is, therefore, excellent, but more can be done to increase the contribution of clinical research to the Spanish economy and society,” says the text. In this line, he proposes to improve the territorial distribution of clinical trials, today highly concentrated in Madrid and Catalonia; reinforce the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (Aemps) so that it gains in agility in the approval of requests for trials; deepen the digitalization of clinical research processes, and facilitate the access of new medicines to the Spanish market, «because the difficulties in this regard have a significant effect on the decisions of location of clinical trials. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that clinical trials save a considerable volume of resources for the public treasury, by allowing the SNS to treat patients free of charge with cutting-edge therapies and medicines with valuable health results.
Secondly, to aspire to Spain becoming a pOnly the manufacture of medicines and health products is “essential” carry out reforms that provide greater flexibility for the technological updating of existing plants in our country; further streamline the administrative processes associated with the granting of permits for the construction of new plants; have qualified labor; support the pharmaceutical industry in its efforts to increase its production capacity, and, once again, eliminate the obstacles to access to new innovative medicines that have been observed in recent years.
Although these obstacles do not yet seem to be influencing the manufacturing decisions of multinationals, they could be in the face of growing competition between different countries to attract production volume, ”says the report.
The pharmaceutical industry, economic engine
In this way, the document demands that the Administration support the pharmaceutical industry as an economic engine in terms of investment in research, employment and manufacturing. In fact, he supports his thesis on the aforementioned data on investment in biomedical R&D and on the fact that the pharmaceutical industry in Spain has more than 80 production plants and more than 42,500 direct jobs -at the end of 2020 (it exceeded 44,000 in 2021) -, exported a value of 12,777 million euros and generated 14,900 million euros in production in 2020, 24% of the total of high technology, positioning itself as one of the largest producers of medicines for human use in Europe.
Regarding the commitment to digitization, the Círculo de Empresarios calls for guaranteeing the interoperability of health information, modernizing the current systems of the health ecosystem through specific financing linesdigitally train healthcare professionals and managers to adapt and be able to take advantage of the new digital environment or promote the creation of an innovation ecosystem as a space for collaboration between innovative entities and the main players in the healthcare world, among other measures.
Finally, deepening public-private collaboration to improve the sustainability of the SNS would require promoting the mobilization of sufficient and sustained economic and organizational resources over time to carry out ambitious plans, involving private initiative; create a unified vision of Health and its care model, or strengthen public-private collaboration models, basing decision-making on quantifiable criteria and objectives agreed upon by public and private actors.
The president of the Círculo de Empresarios and the Health Working Group, Manuel Pérez-Sala and Pedro Nieto, respectively, participated in the presentation of the report; the president of Medtronic Ibérica, María Vila; the president and CEO of Pfizer Spain, Sergio Rodríguez; the head of the Health Area of IBM Spain, Juan Carlos Sánchez Rosado, and the president of Karyotype MH5, Carmen Mateo.
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