European countries are struggling to get ahold of essential medicine supplies for its citizens. In Lithuania, the problem is no different, and many people are growing impatient.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Like many other European member states, Lithuania has reported a number of medicine shortages.
00:07 In Vilnius, we met its Deputy Minister of Health to inquire about the concrete measures
00:14 the country has taken to improve the situation. Among other things, he told us cooperation
00:19 between EU neighbours is crucial to address the issue.
00:23 "We initiated quite a lot of discussions with other countries, for example Poland.
00:30 Poland has a lot of industrial capacity and we are making medicines, let's put it that
00:37 way, while Lithuania is a small country, we do not have that luxury to do that, but we
00:41 can improve the cooperation with a neighbouring country and bring these medications in here.
00:47 So this is one issue we addressed actually and we are focusing on that going further.
00:54 Another issue we understood is that even in our small country, in our network of pharmacies,
01:01 there are a lot of inequalities, for example from wholesalers to the concrete pharmacies,
01:07 the medications are not moving equally. So for example some of the pharmacies can have
01:11 the medication, some wholesalers have the medication, but other pharmacies do not have it.
01:17 So we improved the monitoring of the drugs in the wholesalers, so we hope we can guide
01:26 a little bit our industry in sharing the drugs more equally in the network of our pharmacies as well."
01:34 [Music]