Portugal is one of the European countries where patients wait longest to access innovative medicines, with the average waiting time to be five times greater than Germany, the country with the best results.


The analysis was carried out in the Spring 2019 Report of the Health Systems Observatory, which recommends more transparency in the pricing of medicines and suggests that the drug authority – Infarmed – becomes an independent regulatory body, leaving the final decision on prices and co-funding to the government.


While Germany had an average delay of 119 days to market innovative medicines, Portugal took 634 days, that is, almost two years.
Comparing with Spain considered a comparable and near market, Portugal presented a result 1.6 times worse, with the average Spanish delay below 400 days.


The report of the Portuguese Observatory on Health Systems, which reflects data from the European association of the pharmaceutical industry, stressed that the figures do not show which factors contribute to these delays and said that a more thorough assessment is imperative in the various phases of the access to therapeutic innovation.


“A paradigmatic example was the time for decisions (...) [in the case] of the innovative therapies of hepatitis C “, the document said, adding that this happens “too frequently” and that it is “incomprehensible” in an area where predictability is very high.


Moreover, data on access to innovative medicines in Portugal in the last 10 years showed “significant fluctuations,” which are being motivated by cost containment cycles in the country’s National Health Service (SNS) (especially in the ‘troika’ period) or caused by the pressure to introduce some innovative drugs.


The figures showed that in the period between 2009 and 2018, the year 2017 was the one that recorded the most approval of drugs with new substances or with new therapeutic indications, with 60 new drugs.


From 2009 to 2012, the approval of innovative medicines was always decreasing and then increased more significantly from 2015.
However, in 2018, there was again a decline in the approval of therapeutic innovation, and 40 new medications were approved, when 60 were approved in 2017.