The Finnish pharmaceutical market needs more players

Over the past year or so, the lack of access to medicines in Finland has become an increasingly important issue in the public debate. The problem is a globally growing phenomenon that has begun to affect Finland to an increasing extent, although so far in Finland availability problems still rarely lead to delays in starting or continuing treatment with medicines.

There is no single cause for the lack of availability of medicines, but many different factors are involved, including the concentration of manufacturing of medicines and their raw materials, long and multi-stage production chains, fragmentation of the different stages of the production chain to different actors, lack of availability of raw materials, and quality and logistics problems at different stages of the production chain. In the big picture, however, the causes are related to increased competition in global pharmaceutical markets and changes in the regulatory environment of the industry.

Over the past year or so, challenges to the availability of medicines have been caused in particular by pharmaceutical companies' preparations for Brexit and the introduction of the pharmacovigilance system, which have required extensive changes in both the production lines and packaging materials of medicines throughout Europe.

It is often difficult, if not impossible, to influence the global root causes of pharmaceutical consolidation and availability problems from Finland. At national level, however, it is possible to prepare for this, for example through compulsory stockpiling of medicines, common Nordic packaging and improved information flow.

One aspect that has been neglected in the debate is to avoid a development where only one or two pharmaceutical companies sell a particular medicine for the needs of all Finns. Compared to many other European countries, the import, sale and marketing of generic medicines available on prescription is dominated by a small number of players. Problems in the production chain of even one of these could easily lead to the disappearance of a single product from the whole of Finland.

It would therefore be more advantageous to have more players in the Finnish pharmaceutical market in order to ensure the availability of prescription medicines. At present, the number of players is limited by business realities: Finland is a large but economically small market, which is significantly more difficult and expensive to enter than other Western European countries due to market mechanisms.

By lowering the threshold to enter the market and ensuring Finland's attractiveness as a business environment, we also spread the risk in case of potential supply disruptions.

JoriVaissalo

The author is a returning pharmacist & business developer from the pharmaceutical industry.