A hospital pharmaceutical expenditure of 4.58 billion euros, equal to 4.5% of the National Health Fund (compared to the ceiling of 3.5%), with a breakthrough that in November amounted to 980 million and forecasts for the end of the year to exceed one billion euros.
The data are those of the January-November 2014 monitoring of regional pharmaceutical expenditure, recently published on the website of the Italian Medicines Agency, which also confirms the data on net authorized expenditure which continues to fall, with a drop of around 3.4% (-279 million euros) compared to the same period of 2013. If we analyze the details of the regions, it emerges that only Trento and Valle d'Aosta, for hospital care, are within the parameters of the ceiling, while for all the others there is a difference. And at the top of the ranking are Puglia, Tuscany and Sardinia with respectively a 5.4%, 5.3% and 5.2% of the Fund.
Lombardy, together with Sicily, also recorded a deviation reaching 4% of the Fund. The situation for the area is different: in the period January-November 2014, net of the payback, it reached 11.14% of the Fsn (against the ceiling of 11.35%), equal to 11.1 billion euro, with a surplus compared to the ceiling of -208.8 million. In this case there are eight Regions that go beyond the ceiling: Sardinia, with 14%, Puglia and Calabria (12.8%), Lazio (12.4%), Campania (12.3%), Abruzzo (12.1%), Sicily (11.8%) and Molise (11.4%).
Francesca Giani – Tuesday, March 31, 2015 – Pharmacist33
Osservahealth, 22 packs of medicines per citizen
The use of medicines among Italians is increasing, especially the elderly: in 2013, territorial pharmaceutical consumption grew compared to the previous year (+4.8%). In public and private pharmacies, a total of around 1.3 billion packs were dispensed - on average, twenty-two for each citizen - of which 608 million paid for by the National Health Service. This was underlined by the XII edition of the Osservasalute Report (2014). In the reference year, 1,032 doses of the drug were prescribed per day per 1,000 inhabitants. It should be noted that in the period 2010-2013 there was a substantial increase in consumption in the older age groups, which reaches 42% in the over 75s.
