DRAFT: Cross Party Discussion Paper 2018

The meeting will focus on providing patient representatives with an opportunity to discuss recent developments in the access to medicines space in Ireland, since the IPPOSI-MRCG Roundtables on the same topic in June and October of last year (which resulted in the publication of the Drug Iceberg reports in August 2017 and February 2018). At this meeting, we plan to introduce a new focus for our discussions – the role which politicians may play in raising awareness of access to medicine challenges within our national legislative bodies and within their own political parties (election manifestos, party conferences etc.) We also hope to discuss how individual patient organisations can support IPPOSI and MRCG in bringing the common challenges associated with access to medicines to the attention of political representatives. An agenda for the meeting is being finalised and will be published shortly.

The outcome of discussions from this meeting will inform a cross-party dialogue which we plan to initiate with politicians at the end of November. The draft discussion paper to inform this cross-party dialogue contains a series of recommendations which we (as Irish patient organisations and representatives) might propose to politicians. We will be asking for your feedback on these recommendations and we will be using our meeting on November 7th to arrive at a consensus for how to move forward.