First the crisis, then the liberalisations. And now also the turnovers. Which in the first four months of the year show a minus sign in all the main regions. Double-digit negatives, which worry the owners and make the wait for the new pharmacies, the ones that will emerge from the extraordinary competition, even more grim.
A quick tour of the boot and only worried voices arrive from the regional unions: "In April we recorded a -13% on NHS net spending" they tell Federfarma Toscana "the red recipe is falling but private spending is also falling". "In the first four months, the average drop in NHS margins is around 10%" they report from Piedmont. Not very different percentages come from Friuli Venezia Giulia - where they clearly speak of a "sledgehammer" - and from Puglia, where -15% was even reached in March but only due to a slowdown in the renewal of exemptions which convinced patients to postpone purchases under the NHS regime.
On the other hand, Promofarma returns a little optimism, whose data resize the losses without canceling them. «Let's not forget» explains Gianni Petrosillo, managing director of the service company controlled by Federfarma «that in April last year the resolution was triggered with which AIFA revised the reference prices of equivalents downwards. It is therefore misleading to make comparisons on net expenditure, because that share of gross expenditure represented by the difference between the retail price and the reimbursement price is lost, a share that the citizen pays and the pharmacist pockets». Correctly redistributing the counts, the differences between 2012 and 2011 then become less painful: «In March» continues Petrosillo «we register a -6% in Abruzzo and Lombardy, -2% in Sicily, -10% in Tuscany. It should also be said that the dpc registers a +22%, so the pharmacies are recovering something.
And then let's see what has happened since May, when year-on-year comparisons will be purified of the Aifa effect. There could be a further recovery, even if important generics such as that of atorvastatin cannot fail to weigh on this year's trend».
30 May 2012 – Pharmacist33
