The president of Farmaindustria, Fina Lladós, has highlighted this Wednesday the relevance of patients actively participating in health decisions, emphasizing that they bring irreplaceable knowledge that leads to "the best decisions" and "makes them more useful for society."
Lladós launched this message during the opening of the XIII "Somos Pacientes" Conference, organized by the Farmaindustria Foundation and the "Somos Pacientes" platform under the slogan "Patients who Count: More Participation for a Better Healthcare System," a meeting focused on how to strengthen increasingly ordered and effective participation models within the National Health System (SNS).
Faced with the classic model in which the healthcare system decided for patients, the president of Farmaindustria has argued that their involvement should not be conceived as merely representative or symbolic, but as an essential tool for building a more robust health system.
In this regard, she has valued the work of patient organizations as sources of knowledge, support, and proposals that contribute to improving the daily lives of thousands of people. Furthermore, she has stressed that cooperation with these entities is integrated into a way of understanding innovation and health based on active listening, co-responsibility, and the joint creation of solutions.
The Secretary of State for Health, Javier Padilla, who was in charge of closing the conference, has underlined the significance of the future law on patient organizations, which, if finally approved after the summer, "will undoubtedly be one of the milestones of the legislature."
"As a wish, in a few years, what I hope is that the participation of patient organizations in decision-making processes is not news, that it does not grab headlines, but that it becomes part of the landscape," he pointed out.
Padilla was accompanied by the general director of Farmaindustria, Juan Yermo, who emphasized that patient involvement contributes to protecting the capacity for biomedical innovation and ensuring that its advances are effectively transferred to those who need them, two of the major challenges facing health systems today.
"Innovation is only useful when it reaches those who need it," Yermo recalled, while warning that the speed with which scientific progress is incorporated into healthcare practice directly impacts the population's quality of life.
Similarly, the Director General of Farmaindustria defended the importance of balancing innovation, access, and sustainability so that healthcare systems remain capable of integrating new treatments and responding to current and future challenges.
Key areas of patient participation
Throughout the day, three major areas in which patient participation is gaining increasing weight have been analyzed. Firstly, a debate panel focused on their involvement in healthcare decision-making, in a context marked by the discussion of new structured participation models, the deployment of initiatives seeking to strengthen organized patient representation, and the Preliminary Draft Law on Patient Organizations, which all stakeholders consider a relevant opportunity.
Secondly, an expert panel examined the contribution of patients to the evaluation of health technologies, a determining factor for the incorporation of innovation into health systems. Participants agreed on the need to complement clinical and economic evidence with direct experience and the results that truly matter to those living with a disease, as well as on the advisability of training patients so they can intervene appropriately in these evaluation processes.
The pursuit of greater equity structured the third analysis panel, where it was highlighted that patient experience helps detect inequalities that often go unnoticed, in addition to offering a key vision for moving towards more uniform, fair, and results-oriented care, regardless of a person's territory or pathology. Likewise, the importance of setting indicators to identify and measure inequities in order to correct them was emphasized.