The Pharmintercom conference in Lisbon 2024 was attended by CEOs, Chief Executives, and Presidents of twelve national community pharmacy organisations. The event provided a platform to showcase best practices, share experiences, and discuss advocacy strategies for enabling pharmacists to practice to their full scope while maintaining sustainable funding models for core clinical service delivery.
Key messages from this year’s conference included:
Shared Definition of Pharmaceutical Care: Pharmacy organisations need a unified definition of pharmaceutical care that emphasises the clinical role of pharmacists as custodians of medicines. The core role of ensuring the safe supply and administration of medicines should be highlighted in all advocacy positions.
Funding Remuneration Models: Remuneration models should reflect the core role of pharmacists, with an emphasis on the importance of indexing core funding. Countries without indexation, like Ireland, face significant pressures due to rising costs and static remuneration systems. Conversely, countries with cost pressure recognition and indexation are in a more viable position, allowing them to advocate for and pursue full-scope services. Delegates agreed that core remuneration models should be viable, fair, efficient, explicit, responsive, and equitable.
Irish Delegation Presentation: The Irish delegation presented on the pharmaceutical care continuum and shared key advocacy documents, stimulating a lively debate on the fundamental role of community pharmacists as custodians of medicines and providers of safe supply of medicines alongside clinical services.
OECD Presentation: The OECD presented a recent paper titled “Securing Medical Supply Chains in a Post-Pandemic World.” Delegates had the opportunity to debate and discuss measures to enhance resilience in national medicine supply chains and to convey the impact of shortages on patients and pharmacists in their respective countries to the OECD.
Canadian Delegation Presentation: The Canadian delegation emphasised the need for primary care systems to be provider-agnostic and patient-directed. They advocated for national policies supporting patient access to services from their chosen providers and highlighted the necessity for pharmacists to have read and write access to electronic healthcare records as a key enabler of patient-directed care.
WPC Board Update: The World Pharmacy Council (WPC) board updated the conference on recent meetings with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), focusing on defining community pharmacies as healthcare providers rather than retailers and addressing global medicine shortages.
Interested in finding out more about WPC? Check out the communique on this conference and visit the WPC website. A more detailed article on this conference will feature in next month’s IPU review.
