Madrid, March 12th 2014.- Public pharmaceutical expenditure in Spain on prescriptions financed by the SNS  (Spanish National Healthcare System) has accumulated a fall of 27% during the last four-years. The 6% reduction registered in 2013, added to those endured in 2010 (2.4%), 2011 (8.8%), and 2012 (12.3%). Hence, in the 2009-2013 period, in this concept, more than a quarter of its value has been lost according to the date published in Farmaindustria’s Pharmaceutical Market Monthly Bulletin.

The bulletin stated that the cause of this substantial reduction in public pharmaceutical expenditure on NHS prescriptions is due to reductions in its two main components: prescription consumption, which has dropped by 8%, as well as the average expenditure per prescription, which has dropped by 20% during this period. As a matter of fact, the per capita prescriptions’ consumption in 2013 (18.2 prescriptions per inhabitant per year), is a figure similar to that of 2007. On the other hand, the average expenditure per prescription, which currently stands at 10.68 €, has reached its lowest level since 1998.

Additionally, per capita public pharmaceutical expenditure closed last year with a value of 194.9 € per inhabitant per year, which is a similar level to what this variable marked in 2002, in spite of noticeable improvements made on therapeutic resources provided by the pharmaceutical industry during this period, and the increasing costs involved of innovations in medicines.

This Bulletin, number 105, also analyzes the evolution of public pharmaceutical expenditure in terms of a GDP percentage, which ended 2013 with a 0.9% of our internal production, almost 0.3 (25%) lower than four-years ago, a level not registered in Spain since 1994, when the figure for public pharmaceutical expenditure (in Spain) registered 0.92% of Spanish GDP, in a year in which the per capita GDP was less than half the one in 2013.

On the other hand, public pharmaceutical expenditure in 2013 represented 14.5% of the total Spanish healthcare expenditure, the lowest proportion ever registered since data was recorded, (since 1983). The drop in public pharmaceutical expenditure weight over public healthcare expenditure is a trend which started in 2005, and in the last decade, its importance has been reduced by almost six percent.

Lastly, if public pharmaceutical expenditure weight is analyzed within the whole of the total public expenditure in Spain, 2013 would have ended up in a 2% ratio, i.e., two out of every  hundred euro spent by Public Administrations (as a whole) in Spain would have been allocated to payments of NHS financed medicines dispensed through pharmacy offices;  a figure which had also not been registered in Spain since the early nineties.