England’s independent pharmacies could be losing millions of pounds every year due to generic drug shortages, Sigma Pharmaceuticals has said.

The wholesaler's sales director Rajiv Shah said he had made the “very pessimistic” estimate that his family’s pharmacy lost around £150 per month because of the extra workload of trying to obtain reasonably priced stock.

“If we extrapolate that out to the number of independents in England it comes to over £10 million [a] year,” Mr Shah told delegates at the Avicenna conference in Cyprus yesterday (May 26).

Mr Shah branded this figure “quite scary”, and stressed that the extra workload endured by his family’s pharmacy was “not uncommon”.

Pharmacists were “drowning in paperwork” as a result of the “administrative burden” of using up to five suppliers to source certain products, Mr Shah said.

Recent generics shortages - including nortriptyline, co-amilofruse and co-amilozide - had been caused by mergers and acquisitions between drugs manufacturers, Mr Shah said. Medicines from the UK also were considered the “gold standard” internationally and were often exported abroad, he said.

Independents should follow the example of the multiples and use PMR codes to try to forecast which products would suffer shortages, Mr Shah said. For the last 18 months, Avicenna members had been able to access a monthly list of products that Sigma predicted would receive concessionary prices, he said.

“I’m not standing here saying shortages are over. But if you forecast and have systems in place you won’t get bitten as hard,” he added.

Last month, a C+D investigation revealed the government held nine meetings in 2013 and 2014 to discuss medicines shortages. 

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