June 29, 2016

PLUS 2016 2nd Stakeholder Consensus Meeting

The 2nd PLUS 2016 Stakeholder Consensus Meeting was held on May 24th in Estoril, Portugal.
The topic for the meeting was “Blood and Plasma Regulations – Towards a revision of the EU Blood Directive: What is needed in a new Directive/ Should Plasma be included in the Blood directive?”.

The different organisations in attendance included IPOPI, European Haemophila Consortium (EHC), World Federation of Haemophilia (WFH), International Patient Organization for C1 Inhibitors Deficiencies (HAEI), Alpha-1 Global (Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency International umbrella organisation), American Plasma Users Coalition (A-PLUS), and the following  stakeholder organisations, European Blood Alliance (EBA), International Federation of Blood Donor Organizations (IFBDO), Irish Blood Tranfusion Service (IBTS), Interantional Plasma Fractionation Agency (IPFA), Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association (PPTA) and European Plasma Alliance (EPA).

The meeting was chaired by William Murphy with the support of Brian O’Mahony and Johan Prévot.
After a summary of key points on the topic of a potential revision of the Blood Directive which had been identified at the previous PLUS meeting in January, each participating organisation had the opportunity to provide their initial feedback on the key points as well as provide further comments and suggestions.  A discussion then ensued on the best way to proceed and it was agreed that each organisation should prepare individual proposals on what they would like to see being revised (or not) in the directive in more detail. The different opinions will then be pooled together and further discussed at the next PLUS meeting in January 2017 with a view to prepare a joint position statement.

Prof Murphy announced that he was retiring from his position at the IBTS. All participants wished him well in his future endeavors and thanked him for his excellent chairmanship of the PLUS stakeholders meetings over the last 6 years.