The General Council of Official Associations of Pharmacists (CGCOF) , through its Industry committee , and the Spanish Association of Industry Pharmacists (AEFI) , have organized the conference ‘Serialization of Medicines: 2 years of experience’ in which A balance of the Spanish Drug Verification System (Sevem) has been carried out.
During the opening of the meeting, the president of the CGCOF, Jesús Aguilar , highlighted that “the pharmaceutical profession works together for, for and with the patient. And that the joint effort to guarantee the safety of the medicines that Sevem represents is the best example ”. In this regard, he recalled that “since February 2019, when the entire network of pharmacies has been verifying through its Nodofarma Verification tool , almost 2,200 million operations have been carried out, of which 1,300 million correspond to verifications and 900 million of dispensations ”.
For her part, Angelina Baena, president of AEFI, has pointed out the great investment and human effort that Sevem involved and has claimed greater recognition for the pharmaceutical profession, both within the health sector and by society as a whole.
After the inauguration, Mª Ángeles Figuerola, director of Sevem, carried out an X – ray of the current situation of the system, to which all pharmaceutical laboratories are already attached and which already have 15,400 references with unique identifiers.
On behalf of the pharmaceutical laboratories, Emili Esteve, director of the technical department of Farmaindustria , and María Álvarez, coordinator of regulatory affairs of the Spanish Association of Generic Medicines , have participated, who have referred to the fact that Sevem makes it technically possible to stop using the precinct coupon before the legal limit set for 2024.
The pharmaceutical distribution has been represented by Miguel Valdés, general director of the Federation of Pharmaceutical Distributors (Fedifar) , and José Ramón López Suárez, national member of CGCOF Distribution, who have explained that the 144 warehouses integrated in Fedifar were operational from the first moment, and that the introduction of the two-dimensional Datamatrix code has facilitated greater and more exhaustive control over medications.
The experience of the healthcare pharmacy
During the last table, focused on the healthcare pharmacy, the national member of the CGCOF Pharmacy Office, Teodomiro Hidalgo, has listed the challenges that the implementation of Sevem entailed for the pharmacy network, such as the existence of more than 40 community pharmacy management software, 17 electronic prescription models, o the need to acquire new data readers; at the same time that it has expressed its conviction that in the future it will favor and simplify the management of community pharmacies in matters such as reimbursements or the seal coupon. Representing the hospital environment, Ana Herranz, national member of the Hospital Pharmacy of the CGCOF has given the data that 198 private hospitals already carry out their operations in Sevem, but that public hospitals will do so through Nodo SNSFarma, the tool promoted by the Ministry of Healthand that it is not yet operational. In any case, it has declared that any progress in the traceability of medicines is good news.
At the closing, Eugeni Sedano, national member of the CGCOF Industry, insisted that the conference has made visible the efforts and success of the different agents of the drug chain in these two years to implement the verification system and, in this way, to guarantee more fundamentally the difficulty of introducing counterfeit drugs in our country. While Marta Rodríguez Vélez, member of Quality Assurance, Manufacturing and Quality Control at AEFI has highlighted that Sevem is the best proof of the ability of the pharmaceutical industry, a highly regulated sector, to successfully tackle cross-cutting projects through work collective.