2024-07-30 17:10:40
Many parents of young children have experienced this in recent years: Sometimes you have to go to the pharmacy to find the medicine prescribed for your offspring. To avoid a repeat of this situation next winter, pharmacies will now only have one supply channel to obtain antibiotics for children, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (ANSM) announced on Tuesday.
More specifically, pharmacies must now turn to wholesale distributors, their primary supply channel, rather than placing orders directly with laboratories, for pediatric medicines based on amoxicillin and the related amoxicillin-clavulanate (Augmentin).
Fair distribution in pharmacies
The measures taken “with all the players in the supply chain” must “facilitate the fair distribution of stocks in pharmacies on the French mainland”, the ANSM explained in a press release after bringing the industry together last July 11. Overseas sectors and regions are not worried “due to the particularities of the supply routes”.
Medicine shortages have been a problem for years and continued to plague French lives last year. In 2023, reports of stock shortages or risk of stock shortages even increased by more than 30% in one year, with nearly 5,000 reports submitted to ANSM.
In order to limit this phenomenon, stakeholders in the pharmaceutical industry, under the leadership of the ANSM, signed in November 2023 a “Charter” to ensure that medicines are distributed as “fairly” as possible throughout the country. The idea is that pharmacies will favor supplies from wholesale distributors rather than ordering directly from laboratories, thereby increasing their stocks to the detriment of other pharmacies.
Inventory Release
Amid tensions affecting amoxicillin for children, ANSM in December also asked manufacturers to make “most of their stocks” available “immediately” to wholesale distributors.
If the demand for amoxicillin is contained today as it was in the summer, “we find ourselves still out of stock and we hope to prevent a situation with a similar precedent next winter,” said Fabrice Camaioni, vice president of the French Federation of Pharmaceutical Trade Unions (FSPF). This fully supports the mandatory passage of pharmacies through wholesale distributors. And remember that Doliprane has already fulfilled this obligation.
Expanded coverage of drugs to treat whooping cough
The pharmacists’ union even welcomed the extension of these new rules of the game to antibiotics that can be used to treat whooping cough, while The disease is rife in France. Likewise, he could request Ventolin, an asthma medication that was still hard to find in pharmacies in June.
ANSM said on Tuesday that the measures taken against amoxicillin will be “re-evaluated in the autumn” and are sufficient to fully prepare for the demand for medicines during the winter epidemic.
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