For decades now, the Nordic pharmaceutical authorities have worked together to increase the availability of medicines in the Nordic countries with common Nordic packs for medicines.
- There has been a shortage of several vital medicinal products in the Nordic market for a while now.
- Each Nordic country is a relatively small market, which makes them individually less attractive compared to larger market countries
- Currently, pack labelling is required to be in the national languages.
- There have already been some common Nordic packs with several Nordic languages.
- However, ensuring sufficient access to medicines is challenging when separate packaging in different languages is required.
- A pilot starting at the beginning of 2025 will be testing the usability of having some Nordic hospital product packages in English in all the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
- The aim of this new availability project is to improve the availability of critical hospital products in all Nordic countries by simplifying production and distribution.
- The pilot project will aim to find out whether certain small-scale but critical medicinal products can be exempted from Nordic language requirements and how only using English on packs would work in practice.
- The pilot only includes hospital medicines that are administered by health care professionals.
Source: Fimea