While medicines and novel therapies emerge and new treatments are being discovered, many medicines are still not equally available across Europe.
A new report by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) looked at the time it takes for medicines to become available in the European Union and the differences between countries.
Medicines are becoming less and less available in Europe. In 2025, only 28% of medicines were fully covered by public reimbursement, compared to 42% in 2019.
The differences between countries are also stark.
Patients in certain European countries can wait about seven times longer than patients in other countries to get access to the same medicine, from as little as five months to 37 months, the report found.
