A Review of the Evidence on Attitudes, Perceived Impacts and Motivational Factors for European Member State Collaboration for Pricing and Reimbursement of Medicines: Time for the EEA Member States to Apply Their Experience and Expertise in Evidence-Based Decision Making to Their Current Pharmaceutical Policy Challenges

In 2018/2019 there were a number of initiatives for collaboration between Member States in the European Economic Area (EEA) and the European Commission published a Proposal for a Regulation on Health Technology Assessment. In view of the perceived benefits from collaboration, the experiences and challenges of these collaborative initiatives and the possible implications of the proposed legislation, a study of the evidence on attitudes, perceived impacts and the motivational factors towards European Member State collaboration regarding the pricing and reimbursement of medicines was conducted. This study adopted an evidence–based management approach by Barends and Rousseau. The main findings showed that Member States differed in their motivation for collaboration for different pharmaceutical activities. Member States favoured voluntary co-operation for all activities of pricing and reimbursement except for relative effectiveness assessments where Member State authorities had divergent attitudes and prioritised activities related to the sustainability of their healthcare systems and access to medicines. Contrastingly pharmaceutical companies strongly favoured mandatory cooperation for evaluation. Member States motivation for collaboration was highly dependent on the purpose, political will, implementation climate and cultural factors. Currently, with the experiences of ongoing collaborations, following the progress of the discussion at Council, and with a number of inititatives for new pharmaceutical strategy and policy, it is proposed that Member States use their trust, expertise and knowledge of application of evidence-based decision making for pricing and reimbursement of medicines and apply it to decide the future model for Member State collaboration. The applicability of principles of evidence-based management to pharmaceutical policy can be used as a starting point.

Juvenile Sexual Offending: An EU Prevalence and State Response Study: Study Protocol

Background: Juvenile sexual offending is an area that has been largely under-researched to date and this has resulted in very little and sometimes conflicting research being published in the area. The dearth of empirical data in the space is concerning as it suggests that policy may not be underpinned by an empirical framework and this has far reaching implications for the development of laws, intervention programmes and the management of young people accused/convicted of a juvenile sexual offence. Moreover, the lack of an evidence-based framework has the potential to contribute to misinformation amongst the public who may be relying upon anecdotal news reports and exaggerated media representations. Methods/Design: This study will use a survey to collect the same data from each European member state with the aim of generating comparable data. The first step in the design process was to design a typology of juvenile sexual offences so the data collected represents the same offences across each jurisdiction. The second step in the design process is to design a survey, using the typology, to collect data across each member country. Discussion: This study aims to take a first step towards generating comparable data across each member state. As such this project will be the first to generate accurate comparable data on the prevalence of juvenile sexual offending across each EU Member State and data on how each Member State reacts to juvenile sexual offending.

Odour control strategies for a sustainable nuisances action plan

<p>Different land uses, infrastructures, industrial activities and residential patterns of developed cities expose simultaneously people to several annoying sources.</p> <p>Over recent years, the European Union has provided several tools to harmonize noise mapping methodologies and relative Noise Action Plans through directives. Unfortunately, the same effort has not been made for the harmonization of approaches of other annoying sources such as odours. As a consequence, each European Member State has defined its own direct or indirect approach to limit odour impacts.</p> <p>The most common approach to deal with noise impact is the use of priority indices to highlight areas that are sensitive to both noise and, generally, odour impacts. The aim of the present research is to provide a brief review of the most widely used European strategies in noise action plans as well as try to extend the approaches to the definition of a nuisance action plan, capable of controlling both odour and noise.</p> <p>The analysis underlines that is possible to define the degree of sensitivity of areas according to population, land uses, levels of exposures and/or distance from the annoying sources. Nuisance acceptability levels are then definable according to the sensitivity degree of the locations.</p>

The Impact of the Recent Economic Crisis in the Construction Sectors of the South-European Economies

The scope of this paper is to investigate the performance of listed companies of the construction sector in the southern European member state of the E.U., namely Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, taking into consideration their economic conditions as they have been formed by the recent economic crisis. The structure of the proposed methodology is based on a non-parametric method of DEA. Initially, it is attempted to compare the listed construction companies of each country and then findings are explained in order to draw comparative conclusions of their performance on a cross country basis. By using statistical regression methods, in the second stage of investigation is attempted for possible correlation between each country's efficiency scores and a group of key macroeconomic variables which can show the possible changes in the effects of crisis between the countries under examination.