Drug shortages issue continues to worsen

摘要

Repeat ordering is emphatically not the way to deal with shortages (PJ, 5 February 2011, p125).It may be true that it is only necessary, on average, to order an item three times in order to obtain it (which is in itself an appalling statistic), but this figure hides the fact that essential items such as prednisolone tablets 5mg (a recent example) go out of stock for weeks or, sometimes, even months.Generic medicines such as this are supposedly available from a number of manufacturers, so how is it possible that none is available from any source? More revealing and interesting statistics would be the number of times GPs have to rewrite prescriptions for alternative products (eg, soluble or gastro-resistant prednisolone tablets) or how many cancer patients have had their regular dose of depot goserelin delayed because of lack of supply from the manufacturer.