Nutricia is a company with great traditions and capital. It is 127 years old. What pioneering, innovative solutions in specialty nutrition have you brought to the market, not only in Poland?
Yes, the company is more than a century old and has Dutch roots. Nutricia started with the category of products for children, specifically their proper nutrition. This has also been the core of our business in the Polish market for the years. 90. Here we are also developing new product categories for other groups of patients or consumers. I'm thinking particularly of adult patients, which is partly related to the inexorable demographics in Europe, including Poland.
The company has a beautiful motto - to serve people with the best nutritional care at the most sensitive moments of a person's life. That is, from the youngest to the oldest citizen?
Yes, we have several educational programs. Among them, "1000 first days" with more than ten years of tradition, where we used to count these 1000 days from the moment of birth, but some time ago we decided that we would count them from the day of conception, because the habits we have at least during pregnancy also affect how the child will function in its first years, and consequently throughout life. So we start as early as the prenatal period.
In what areas of medical nutrition are there the greatest needs in Poland at the moment?
Medical nutrition is the second product category that we have been developing for many years. Actually, we are specialists in this and the largest company in Europe in this discipline. It is mainly based on the assumptions and research of evidence-based medicine, which states that certain diseases with improper nutrition, the provision of nutritional substrates, run worse. The correct level of nutrition of patients with different products, depending on the ailment, diseases, affects the effectiveness of treatment in a given therapy. I am talking about milder diseases like allergies, where we use elimination diets, in which certain ingredients are not given, which we have in normal food. But I'm also talking about support for advanced diseases (cancer, stroke, neurological), where the patient simply wouldn't survive without medical nutrition products. On the one hand, we improve the quality of life of these patients, but in some cases we also save lives.
Every year we celebrate World Health Day. This year it fell on April 7. It drew attention to the fact that a huge challenge to public health around the world is the problem of malnutrition. We rarely pay attention to this problem.
It's true. We have in the Polish language a somewhat unfortunate word - malnutrition, which In Poland is mainly associated with starving children in Africa. And, in fact, the problem affects us, here, at least patients staying in hospitals. And it's not because of what kind of diet the hospitals offer, but the course of the disease itself causes the patient to be malnourished and have poorer treatment prospects. We promote healthy eating habits, healthy attitudes when it comes to medical nutrition. And in fact, in certain types of diseases, even if only oncology, we want nutrition to be an integral part of therapy. Just as an oncologist's responsibility is chemotherapy, radiation therapy, so we want medical nutrition to become an integral part of his responsibility. Especially since there is no sanctioned role for a nutritionist in Poland. Because in the West it is often the case that the nutritionist supports the doctor. In our country, only in large institutions this happens. In most it is on the shoulders of the doctor.
In Poland, are medics, patients and their caregivers aware of the importance and role of medical nutrition? Or is there a lot of work to be done in this regard?
I would not like to offend anyone by saying that this is not the case. But this is the truth. There are also different medical specialties with different levels of awareness on this issue. And it seems to me that over the past few years, a great deal of good has happened in oncology. There are more and more oncologists who know that a cancer patient who is well-nourished has a completely different prognosis and endures the side effects of chemotherapy, their hospitalization time is reduced, and there are fewer complications and repeat hospitalizations. These are measurable health benefits. Also for the facilities, financially for the system, because such a patient simply prognoses better.
What does the home nutrition care service you offer consist of?
This is a trend that developed in Western Europe and the US a few years ago. In Poland, the procedure of home feeding is reimbursed by the National Health Fund and consists in the fact that a patient who is hospitalized for an oncological disease or after a stroke, can continue his treatment at home, more friendly to him, with the care of his family, receiving nutritional products, but also nursing and medical visits, service including laboratory tests. Such a patient, in a home environment, recovers better. He is also three to four times cheaper from the payer's point of view than as a patient in a hospital ward. So this is a procedure that will grow from the payer's financial point of view, but also because of demographics. There are and more elderly Poles. Such a procedure also helps shorten hospital stays, because the hospital can discharge someone to their home who is well cared for. We, as a company, have been providing home feeding products to healthcare providers (public and private) for years. For more than a dozen years we have also been providing this service through our Polish subsidiaries (Nutrimed, Stomed and Promedica), taking care of patients in their homes.
This is a separate business activity, as more and more people will need such care. How many patients are currently under such care, and how many could be?
We evaluate this through the prism of Western European countries, where this procedure has been in operation for many years. We see there what saturation is and how many patients there are with various ailments. In Poland, there are about 12,500 patients in this procedure who receive this home care every day from various providers. There are more than 50 of these providers in Poland. And we estimate that we could take care of twice as many patients in this way if there was proper awareness of this procedure. But there is no such awareness. It's probably greater in surgical and gastroenterology wards, where patients have nutritional problems and are put on the special access required to carry out this procedure (either through a so-called PEG or through a nasal probe). In other hospital departments, there is no awareness at all that a patient could continue home treatment after a hospital stay. This is a major challenge for providers, who should also educate about this procedure, that it is.
During the World Economic Forum, the Nutricia factory was the only factory in Poland to receive an award. What was taken into account and what makes this factory stand out?
We have two factories in Poland. In Krotoszyn and Opole. The factory in Opole is the largest in the world at the moment. It specializes in nutritional products for healthy children as well as those with gastric problems and allergies. The factory received an honorable mention at the Davos Economic Forum as the first in Poland. So far, the distinctions on a global scale have been received mainly by companies producing various types of Hi Tec products. Very rarely do factories in the pharmaceutical/FMCG industry receive such awards. This award is given for the digitalization of this factory's environment. There are about 100 projects going on that robotize this factory, starting from the entrance, where we are greeted at the door by a robot with which we have to go through a procedure of knowing the health and safety regulations of the factory. From the machine controllers, information is sent to a computer, which, for example, optimizes the production process. The fact that the factory received the award is due not only to what is in the factory, but also to what has been done around it. Such as cooperation with the University of Opole and its students, who organize various competitions and are invited to the factory site to offer their vision on the production way. We also have grants. Our factory is supported by the local environment, local authorities, the scientific community. Because it is the pride of the Opole region.
The Nutricia Foundation was established 25 years ago. What are the goals of the Foundation and what projects it carries out?
We are very proud of the Nutricia Foundation, as it is one of the first corporate foundations established in Poland. It aims to raise awareness of the wisdom of proper eating habits through programs, the example of which "1000 First Days" I have already mentioned, and educational campaigns that build awareness of nutrition in people with various diseases, in the elderly. The third stage is the grant support we give to researchers working on the broad topic of nutrition and healthy habits. And the fourth thing, which is very important, is to create awareness among the entire medical community about the role of nutrition. At the moment we have signed agreements with 4 medical universities in Poland. We have managed to include the topic of nutrition in the education of medical students. I myself graduated from a medical academy, and I must say that I thought I had some knowledge of nutrition, but when I took up the subject professionally it turned out that my studies were insufficient. So we are training doctors, medics, pharmacists in university classes. We think we will eventually succeed in persuading all medical universities in Poland to make nutrition an integral part of teaching.
What are the biggest challenges facing Nutricia now?
These challenges are many. We have some specialty innovations that we would like to start implementing. We have products in narrow ranges of therapeutic groups and new types of milk for children. These are new areas. And on the other hand, the down-to-earth challenge for today is the prevailing inflation, because our products, some of which we produce in Poland and some of which we import from abroad, are getting more and more expensive. And we would not want the consumer to be unable to afford them. So there are reimbursement challenges, because of course we have part of the specialty portfolio reimbursed. But we have some of the self-pay category products, which the patient has to pay for themselves, and we would like them to be standard in many proceedings. So for today, the biggest challenge is inflation.
