Pharmacies were left without much-needed medicine over the weekend after Alliance Healthcare suffered "an air conditioning outage in the server location", which disrupted "some IT systems in our support centre" last Thursday (September 7), the wholesaler said.

Deliveries resumed on Monday (September 11), and Alliance Healthcare said at the time it expected the backlog to have cleared by Wednesday.

However, in a statement published yesterday, Alliance Healthcare said “80% of our service centres will have recovered” by the end of the day, and the “remaining sites will have recovered by close of play [Thursday]”.

“Twice-daily deliveries have resumed for all customers,” it added.

The wholesaler advised contractors to “order normally from Alliance Healthcare” and said its emergency order process remains in place for urgent requests.

“Patient safety is always our main priority. To that effect, we have added 100 personnel to our service centres, so we can process any remaining orders as quickly as possible,” Alliance Healthcare said.

It repeated its “sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused”.

Read how pharmacists coped with the delivery delays here.