The FINANCIAL — Protopic, Preservative Free Eye drops, Diclofenac, Floria Vitamin F and Fenistil Pencivir are a few examples of medicines that are out-of-stock in Georgia.
Pharmacy companies do not import these and many other important medicines claiming not only low demand from the population but also low profit margin.
“The import of medicines is totally dependent on demand from the market. To supply medicines which are unknown to the wider masses of the population is commercially very unprofitable for the company,” Tea Javakhishvili, GPC Pharmacy, told The FINANCIAL.
As Javakhishvili added, sometimes a restricting reason is price as well. The companies prefer not to supply a large amount of expensive medicines which are used for the treatment of rare diseases.
“I wouldn’t say that the prices define the import of medicines in our pharmacies. We just don’t supply drugs which aren’t regularly demanded by customers,” Bregvadze, Aversi, told The FINANCIAL.
Bregvadze also explained that the import of recently discovered medicines depends on doctors’ treatment methods and information-processing.
“Initially doctors should be informed about new medicines. If they don’t prescribe the drugs we won’t be informed about these achievements. We are big companies and we lead wholesale with big quantities,” continued Bregvadze. “We constantly conduct monitoring of our chain. If pharmacists say that any medicine has been demanded over three times in each drugstore, we start negotiations about its import. That means that people have already heard about this remedy. Sometimes there is a shortage of extremely demanded medicines. They are easily sold out. We have to order and wait till their import.”
As doctors say, while prescribing a medicine, they always take into consideration the stock of medicines in Georgia.
“There is a database of medicines on Vidal.ge. We are always informed of what we have in stock,” said Nino Lomidze, Allergist. “Of course I always prescribe medicines that we have in the database. Nowadays we have quite a wide choice to find generics with the same substance from. In exceptional cases we fill a prescription and the patient can buy the medicine abroad.”
Patients frequently complain that these generics aren’t properly efficient. A solution to the issue is to buy original drugs online in the USA or Europe. But delivery takes minimum 2 weeks. Besides not everyone can buy online, especially elderly people who don’t use a computer or have a credit card.
Some medicines in Georgia cost twice as much here than abroad, e.g. Diovan is twice as expensive as in the US. On occasions like this, online shopping is very profitable for customers. Express Line Service (Els.ge) is one of the companies which provides a delivery service from the USA. One can find plenty of online shops on its webpage. After ordering goods, the subscriber gives the address of the ELS Company in America. Online shops send the goods to the ELS office in the US. Then Express Line Service delivers the packages from America within a week.
Apart from big pharmacy companies, there are small organisations which import out-of-stock medicines. For them it’s more beneficial to purchase drugs in small quantity. Astellas Pharma – Georgia is one of the small companies which imports out-of-stock medicines in Georgia.
“We are going to import Protopic and other out-of-stock medicines by the beginning of June,” hopes David Kuprashvili, Director of Astellas Pharma – Georgia.
Nowadays we have about 6,000 different medicines in Georgia. In order to maintain the competition and lower the prices the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia gave exclusive rights to several companies to import 50-100 medicines. Statistics show that the number of persons who visited ambulatory-clinics grew from 5,000 to 7,000 by 2009.
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