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The European Health Union and access to health technologies 
Is joint purchasing the way forward? 

Webinar I 10 February 2022  I 12:00 - 13:00 CET

 

This 60-minute session is the first webinar in a 2022 European Health Union initiative webinar series, organised in close cooperation  between the European Health Forum Gastein and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. 

The enduring problem of ensuring sustainable and equitable access to affordable medicines and other health technologies for all has been highlighted once again during the COVID-19 crisis.  In this upcoming webinar, we will explore whether we can harness the recent experience of joint purchasing during the pandemic to better ensure equitable access to health technologies for diverse patient groups in the future. 

We will consider: 

  • regional voluntary collaborations for improving access to high-priced medicines such as the BeNeLuxA initiative and the Valletta Declaration; 

  • the work planned under the multi-stakeholder Oslo Medicines Initiative; 

  • contracts under the EU Joint Procurement Agreement for PPE, ventilators, laboratory equipment, therapeutic remdesivir, and ICU medicines during the COVID-19 pandemic; 

  • the joint purchasing of COVID-19 vaccines using Advance Purchase Agreements with vaccine manufacturers through funds under the European Commission´s Emergency Support instrument.  

In light of what we know from these different mechanisms, we will discuss the potential to adopt or adapt them for purchasing technologies beyond public health emergencies, such as very costly medicines. Join us on Thursday 10 February to discuss the opportunities and challenges of joint purchasing, and to assess the potential to adapt the current regulatory framework to achieve a fairer, more transparent and sustainable solution to this ongoing “wicked” problem! 

If you have any questions for the speakers, ask them during registration, during the event via the webinar Q&A function, via email to info@ehfg.org - or tweet @GasteinForum or @OBShealth with #healthprocurement.  

Details

Start: February 10, 2022
12:00 PM (UTC/GMT +01:00 - Europe / Vienna)
End: February 10, 2022
1:00 PM (UTC/GMT +01:00 - Europe / Vienna)
European Health Forum Gastein

Online event

Speakers

Richard Bergström

Vaccine Coordinator
Government Offices of Sweden
Richard Bergström
  • Richard Bergström

    On June 16, 2020, Richard Bergström was appointed to be Sweden’s vaccine coordinator, which forms an important part of the vaccine strategy presented by the Swedish government in May 2020. His appointment runs until 2022.

    He previously held the position as Director General of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), and served for nine years as the Director General of LIF, the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry, following positions in Switzerland in regulatory affairs at the pharmaceutical companies Roche and Novartis. Richard Bergström was also appointed by the Swedish Government to the Board of the Karolinska Institute.

    He is a pharmacist by training, receiving his MScPharm degree from the University of Uppsala, Sweden in 1988.

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Anniek de Ruijter

Associate Professor Health Law and Policy
University of Amsterdam
Anniek de Ruijter
  • Anniek de Ruijter

    Anniek de Ruijter is Associate Professor Health Law and Policy at the University of Amsterdam and Director and initiator of the Law Centre ofr Health and Life. She is Member of the Board of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Section on Public Health and Law of the European Public Helath Association. Within the University of Amsterdam she is research fellow at the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG) at the Faculty of Law of the UvA and an affiliated fellow of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES). Anniek de Ruijter is member of the editorial board of the European Journal Risk Regulation with Cambridge University Press and on the Editorial Advisory Board of The LANCET Regional Europe.

    De Ruijters research focuses on questions regarding constitutional safeguards for health specific rights and values, partiularly also in the context of EU and global regulatory interactions. In 2017 she received the Veni award of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research for a four-year research project on improving the EU constitutional order for responding to human health disasters such as pandemics or bioterrorist attacks.

    She is the director and founder, with many others, of the Amsterdam Law Practice programme for Experiential Learning at the Faculty of Law.

    Anniek de Ruijter was a year-long Fulbright fellow to the United States. She holds a LLM (Masters in Law) from both Columbia University School of Law (NYC) and the University of Amsterdam. She completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Law, under supervision of Professor Deirdre Curtin. The thesis received 'honorable mention for outstanding new academic work’ from the Dutch Association for Health Law. Anniek was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School Petrie Flom Center for Health Law and Policy, Columbia University, School of Law, and at the Ecole de Droit de la Sorbonne, Pantheon, Paris1.

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Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat

Director of the Division of Country Health Policies and Systems
WHO Regional Office for Europe
Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat
  • Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat

    Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat is the Director of the Division of Country Health Polices and Systems at WHO Regional Office for Europe. She is the Past President of the European Public Health Association.

    Dr Azzopardi-Muscat qualified as a medical doctor and proceeded to specialize in public health and health service management. Her transdisciplinary research bridging health policy, European studies and small states studies led to her PhD entitled “The Europeanisation of health systems: a small state perspective”.

    She has authored several publications in public health and European health policy.

    Between 2001 and 2013, she occupied various senior positions in the Ministry of Health in Malta, including that of Chief Medical Officer. Since 1999, Dr Azzopardi-Muscat has also been a resident academic at the University of Malta, in the departments of health services management and public health.

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Alexander Natz

Secretary General
EUCOPE
Alexander Natz
  • Alexander Natz

    Alexander Natz is the Secretary General of the European Confederation of Pharmaceutical Entrepreneurs (www.eucope.org) in Brussels and advises innovative pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including start-ups, in regulatory and pricing & reimbursement matters from the EU law and German law perspective. From 2008 to 2013, he was Head of the Brussels Office of Bundesverband der Pharmazeutischen Industrie e.V. (BPI). Before, he has been a lawyer at Sträter Law Firm in Germany with a special focus on managed entry agreements and licensing of pharmaceuticals. Dr. Natz has also worked in the field of competition law with the European Commission and in the pharmaceutical industry. As a research assistant at Duke University (USA) he has dealt with international pharmaceutical law. His doctorate was supervised by the former judge at the European Court of Justice, Prof. Dr. Dr. Ulrich Everling

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Charlotte Roffiaen

European Affairs Advisor
France Assos Sante
Charlotte Roffiaen
  • Charlotte Roffiaen

    Charlotte Roffiaen is a trained lawyer. She holds a degree in political sciences from Sciences Po in Paris, a law degree from the Sorbonne University, and a master’s degree in EU law from the Panthéon-Assas University in Paris.

    Charlotte has been involved in advocacy since 2001, when she joined the Italian non-profit organisation Cittadinanzattiva and contributed to the creation and development of Active Citizenship Network (ACN), a European network of citizens and patient organisations. She directed ACN until 2008 and contributed to creating the European Charter of Patients’ Rights (2002), the European Patients’ Rights Day (2007), and to promoting the direct involvement of European citizens in the monitoring and improvement of their rights to health care. In 2008, Charlotte started advising non-profit organisations on their European strategy as an external consultant. The “Union nationale des associations agréées d’usagers du système de santé” (UNAASS), the platform representing patients and health care users in France (over 70 member organisations), counts among her clients.

    Charlotte joined the Lymphoma Coalition (LC) as a Regional Director in June 2015 to set up, develop and manage LC European branch (LCE). LC is a global network of lymphoma patient groups, which gathers 67 member organisations from 45 countries and was incorporated in Canada in 2010. Charlotte works in close collaboration with LC 38 member organisations based in Europe, Turkey and Israel. She supports and coordinates the development of their advocacy and awareness raising activities, providing them with data on the lymphoma patient experience, knowledge and capacity building opportunities, communication tools, etc. She has also been developing LCE European advocacy strategy aimed at improving lymphoma patient’s access to care and at promoting the involvement of patient organisations in the design of clinical trials and in the approval of treatments.

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Moderation: Dimitra Panteli

Moderation: Dimitra Panteli
  • Moderation: Dimitra Panteli

    Dimitra is a member of the Observatory’s Senior Management Team and is based at the Secretariat in Brussels. Her work focuses on evidence-informed health policy and evidence-based health care in Europe, particularly regarding quality of care, coverage and access. She leads the Observatory´s pillar of work on Innovation and supports its knowledge brokering programme in evidence briefings, webinars and policy dialogues. Before joining the Observatory, Dimitra worked as a senior research fellow at the Department of Health Care Management at Technische Universität Berlin, a role she held for more than 10 years. She holds a doctorate in public health from the Technische Universität Berlin, a Masters in Science – Public Health from the Charité Medical University in Berlin (as a scholar of the German Academic Exchange Service), and a Medical Degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. She spent the 2016–2017 academic year as a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Washington, DC.

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Partners

European Health Union Initiative

European Health Observatory

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