Mission and objectives

Mission

CHESSMEN envisages strengthening the coordinating structure in relation to identifying, managing and preventing medicine shortages, as well as optimize the use of the available resources of all Member States, by both supporting the existing networks and initiatives already active in the field, such as the Medicines Shortages Single Point of Contact (SPOC) Working Party and the Heads of Medicines Agencies / European Medicines Agency Task Force on Availability of authorised medicines for human and veterinary use, as well as enhancing Member States cooperation in the:

• the identification of the root causes of medicines shortages;
• the identification and promotion of best practices;
• the definition of a common dataset proposal for the notification and management of medicines shortages;
• the reduction of shortages via preventive strategies.

Main objectives

• Strengthening the coordination between National and European Competent Authorities and optimizing existing initiatives.
• Collection and consolidation of country specific data, statistics, definitions, concepts and procedures to support the bottom-up harmonisation strategy.
• Agreement on common definitions, concepts and procedures towards the harmonisation of the modus operandi.
• Identification and categorisation of the root causes of shortages.
• Identification of best practices to address medicine shortages.
• Provision of common grounds for a harmonised IT concept model at national level, facilitating the management of medicines shortages, monitoring supply and implementing mitigation measures.
• Definition of preventive and mitigation strategies to reduce medicine shortages considering the respective root causes.

The Joint Action objectives are established towards the harmonisation of the modus operandi of the different Member States both:

• directly by building a collection of Good Practices gathered from the Member States experiences that could be fully or partially adapted and adopted by all the other interested Member States;
• and indirectly by working together to build the collection of models and Good Practices, and the tools that will be designed within the Joint Action programme.