Ensuring patient access to novel antibiotics to fight AMR
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a growing threat to Europe’s health and economic future and is likely to become the next pandemic. Antibiotic resistance rates vary across European countries and are increasing across the board. Hence, it is imperative to take urgent action. Ensuring patient access to novel antibiotics is one of the key strategic pillars to fight AMR. Therefore, we need to implement effective interventions on national and European scales.
Key barriers
National policy makers should identify and address the key barriers hampering patient access in their country. This report describes six barriers national policy makers face in enabling optimal patient access to novel antibiotics:
- Standard value assessment methods not capturing the value of novel antibiotics
- Financial return linked to volume used
- Restrictions in reimbursement criteria, hospital protocols or formularies, hampering patient access to treatment they need at the time they need it
- Cost-driven procurement models
- Insufficient hospital funding
- Suboptimal susceptibility testing
Recommendations
This report provides six policy recommendations and inspiring practices for addressing national barriers hampering patient access to novel antibiotics:
- Developing new value-assessment methods
- Introducing new reimbursement models
- Exempting novel antibiotics of value-assessments
- Exempting novel antibiotics of price anchoring
- Carving-out, or adding-on, extra costs of antibiotics from hospital budgets
- Ensuring strong clinical guidance in patient bodies
LET’S DISCUSS
Inspired to share your thoughts? Or would you like to learn more about how decisionmakers and stakeholders across Europe can introduce national mechanisms to ensure that patients get access to novel antibiotics when they need them, now and in the future. We would be delighted to hear from you.
