For pharmacy to survive as a global industry it must switch to a new business model, the head of the Portuguese pharmacy trade body (ANF) has warned.

Falling generics prices combined with austerity measures would mean most Portuguese pharmacies being unable to survive the year, ANF president Paulo Duarte told the annual conference of the European Association of full-line wholesalers (GIRP) in Lisbon last week (June 4).

But he warned this was not a problem confined to Portugal. "If we want to survive as a global industry, pharmacies and wholesalers need to look very different to how we look with the current business models," he said. "What worked in the past probably won't work in the next 10 or 15 years."

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One of the problems affecting pharmacy was generics price drops pushing down wholesaler and pharmacists' profit margins. "This is reducing what the pharmacist and the wholesaler are receiving for each package they are dispensing," Mr Duarte said. He also warned that pharmacists and wholesalers needed to be part of any decisions monitoring the price of medicines in each country. "Pharmacy and wholesalers should and could have a very important role," he said. "We believe that, in the short term, we need to change our remuneration model to build a new model for pharmaceuticals, wholesalers and pharmacies."

The conference also heard criticism directed at the spending cuts being imposed on Portugal by the so-called EU "troika", which consists of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The governments of Europe were forgetting that "those in the healthcare sector had a role in the economy, in paying taxes, in hiring people and in making money for the country", said president of the Portuguese Pharmaceutical Industry Association (Apifarma) Almeida Lopes.