The professional association of paediatricians is calling for the federal government to intervene at short notice because of supply problems with medicines for small children such as fever syrup. “We now need a procurement campaign pushed by politicians in order to quickly get fever juice, certain antibiotics and other preparations for small children that have become rare, like at the beginning of the corona pandemic,” said association president Thomas Fischbach of the “Rheinische Post”. The plans for legislative changes presented by Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD) would come too late.
“We are experiencing a very high demand for antipyretic drugs such as ibuprofen or paracetamol because an extremely large number of children are currently ill,” said Fischbach. “It is an indictment that medicines as simple as fever syrup are often no longer available.” Desperate parents would come to the practices, the pharmacists would have to endure the trouble through no fault of their own. “There are too few suppliers of such drugs because the fixed price regulation has led to production moving to low-wage countries such as India and China,” criticized the pediatrician. “There are now supply chain problems there, which in turn leads to supply bottlenecks.”
Change in public procurement law planned
There had also recently been supply bottlenecks for some medicines for adults. In response, the federal government wants to change procurement law. A spokesman for the Ministry of Health said at the end of November that the aim is to broaden supply chains so that the dependence on individual manufacturers decreases. The situation is unsatisfactory despite existing instruments for alternative preparations in the event of bottlenecks. Lauterbach had told the ARD capital studio that health insurance companies should no longer be forced to buy medicines and active ingredients where they are cheapest.
The bottlenecks are a nuisance for pharmacies because they have to find alternatives to medicines for patients or sometimes have to produce them themselves – this is time-consuming and expensive. The President of the Federal Union of German Associations of Pharmacists (ABDA), Gabriele Regina Overwiening, therefore called for an additional fee: “Pharmacies urgently need a fee for the management of supply bottlenecks in order to be able to cope with the high expenditure of time and personnel,” she told the “Rheinische Post”. “In the medium and long term, we need more production capacity for important medicines, such as antibiotics, in Europe.”
