The minister spoke of these two measures included in the proposal for the State Budget for 2023 (OE2023) at the annual conference of the Health in Dialogue Platform, with the theme Health: New Paths, a Common Purpose”.

According to the budget proposal, approved in general in parliament, the Government will promote “the implementation of proximity access systems, in workshop pharmacies, to medicines prescribed in hospitals for the treatment of pathologies to be selected”.

Manuel Pizarro noted that 150,000 people have to travel “month after month” to the hospital, some having to travel hundreds of kilometres, to “just collect the last prescription from their doctor” to have essential medicines.

“I think we are capable of doing better than this, of simplifying this, without any risk of reducing the quality and monitoring of the prescription” and with “greater convenience” for people, using resources that already exist in the community, which have “very qualified professionals”.

Another measure included in OE2023 is the development of “an automatic prescription renewal mechanism for chronically ill patients, in an SNS/workshop pharmacies interaction”.

According to the official, this measure will have a “huge impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people with chronic illness”, who often have to overload local and professional health services just to renew chronic illness medication.

But, he noted, this measure must be analysed “with great care from a technical point of view”, with doctors, pharmacists, nurses, “because a chronic medication for a chronic disease may not be a chronic prescription”.

Asked on the sidelines of the conference about the lack of some medicines, Manuel Pizarro clarified that “the overwhelming majority of medicines do not have any supply problems”.