Printing process of dummy packs with Datamatrix for unit verification.
The General Council of Official Associations of Pharmacists (CGCOF), through its Industry section, and the Spanish Association of Pharmacists of the Industry (AEFI), have organised the conference ‘Serialisation of Medicines: 2 years of experience’ in which a balance of the Spanish System of Verification of Medicines (Sevem) has been made.
During the inauguration of the meeting, the president of the CGCOF, Jesús Aguilar, stressed that “the pharmaceutical profession works united by, for and with the patient. And that the joint effort to ensure the safety of 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 to dispensations”.
For her part, Angelina Baena, president of AEFI, pointed out the great investment and human effort made by Sevem and called for 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, gave an overview of the current situation of the system, to which all pharmaceutical laboratories have already adhered and which already has 15,400 references with unique identifiers.
Representing pharmaceutical laboratories were Emili Esteve, director of the technical department of Farmaindustria, and María Álvarez, coordinator of regulatory affairs of the Spanish Generic Medicines Association, who referred to the fact that Sevem makes it technically possible to stop using the tamper-evident coupon before the legal limit set for 2024.
Pharmaceutical distribution was represented by Miguel Valdés, director general of the Federation of Pharmaceutical Distributors (Fedifar), and José Ramón López Suárez, national spokesperson for Distribution of the CGCOF, who explained that the 144 warehouses integrated in Fedifar were operational from the outset, and that the introduction of the two-dimensional Datamatrix code has facilitated greater and more exhaustive control over medicines.
The experience of the care pharmacy
During the last round table, which focused on healthcare pharmacy, the national spokesman for the CGCOF Pharmacy Office, Teodomiro Hidalgo, listed the challenges that the implementation of Sevem posed for the pharmacy network, such as the existence of more than 40 community pharmacy management software programmes, 17 electronic prescription models, or the need to acquire new data readers; He also expressed his conviction that in the future it will favour and simplify the management of community pharmacies in matters such as reimbursements or the precinct voucher. Representing the hospital sector, Ana Herranz, national spokesperson for Hospital Pharmacy of the CGCOF, stated that 198 private hospitals already carry out their operations in Sevem, but that public hospitals will do so through the SNSFarma Node, the tool promoted by the Ministry of Health and which is not yet operational. In any case, he declared that any progress in the traceability of medicines is good news.
At the closing session, Eugeni Sedano, the CGCOF’s national spokesperson for Industry, insisted that the conference had highlighted the efforts and success of the different agents in the medicine chain over the last two years to implement the verification system and, in this way, to provide a better guarantee of the difficulty of introducing counterfeit medicines into our country. Meanwhile, Marta Rodríguez Vélez, member of AEFI’s Quality Assurance, Manufacturing and Quality Control department, highlighted that Sevem is the best proof of the pharmaceutical industry’s capacity, a highly regulated sector, to successfully tackle cross-cutting projects through collective work.