The Association Internationale de la Mutualité (AIM) is a grouping of autonomous health insurance and social protection bodies operating according to the principles of solidarity and non-profit-making orientation.
Health and social mutual societies differ very much but share all common values. Through history, they adapted to the national systems they are working in. In general, health and social mutuals can be defined by some common characteristics. The first is that they all have the funding and/or provision of healthcare and social services as their principal activity. Secondly, they are all autonomous and have some form of internal member control. As health and social mutuals have no shareholders, they are not oriented to make profits but to serve members interests.
While recognising that the revised proposals represent an improvement on the proposals of December 2008, which we might attribute to a great extent to the work of the European Parliament, ESIP and AIM believe that these new proposals like the old still present an important risk for disguised advertising by the industry and undue increased public expenditure, both to the detriment of patients and health care systems and as such cannot be accepted as they stand.
At the same time, the proposals still fail to demonstrate any clear added value to patients; the needs of patients for comparative information on medicines is not addressed.
ESIP and AIM believe that the interests of patients and the general public are better served by supporting independent public bodies to provide the public with comprehensive, comparative, unbiased and high quality information about all medicines available to them on the EU market.
In our paper we highlight the risks and concerns that AIM and ESIP see in the current proposals and offer our views on how the interests of patients and the general public can be better served by shifting resources to the provision of information by responsible independent public bodies.
02-04-2012 AIM, ESIP, ISDB and MiEF joint position paper on the reform of the medical devices Directives AIM, ESIP, ISDB and MiEF main suggestions relate to an entire overhaul the European authorisation and surveillance system for high-risk medical devices. The new framework should focus on strengthened transparency and patient safety, in particular for the following three pillars:
(1) marketing authorisation
(2) surveillance and vigilance
(3) reinforcement of patient rights and liability.
