In a medicine supply notification shared by Community Pharmacy England (CPE) yesterday (August 26), the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) said that both 500microgram and 1mg tablets of repaglinide “will be out of stock from late August until early December 2025”.
The DH added that 2mg tablets of the antidiabetic drug are “in limited supply until early December 2025 and cannot support any increase in demand”, but that “alternative glucose-lowering medication” is still available.
Read more: Online pharmacies see Mounjaro stock shortages amid price hike
The notice follows NHS figures on dispensing in the community published last week (August 21) revealing that the cost of prescribed treatments for diabetes in England has doubled to £1.92 billion over the past 10 years.
According to the new data, diabetes treatments made up 15% of spending on all prescribed items in 2024/25, while the cost of prescribing antidiabetic drugs jumped to £1.1bn - an increase of 18% compared to the year before.
Mounjaro boom
The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) said that much of the increase in diabetes drug costs seen over the last ten years has been driven by dapagliflozin, brand name Forxiga, and interstitial fluid sensors such as Freestyle Libre or Dexcom.
This year, however, a new driver of spending growth is tirzepatide, the diabetes and weight loss drug sold under the brand name Mounjaro.
Compared to 2023/24, the cost of tirzepatide is up “340-fold to £120 million” and the drug also saw prescriptions increase from 2,595 items to 1.1 million items over the same period, the NHSBSA said.
Read more: LATEST: DH reveals new Mounjaro NHS reimbursement prices
The NHS analysis also found that antidiabetic drugs were the most prescribed of any diabetes medication in 2024/25, accounting for 59% of items and 75% of the total spend on diabetes treatments.
The number of items prescribed for treating diabetes in England stood at 77 million in 2024/25, up 9% on the previous year and a 56% increase from 2015/16, it said.
Parts of the country with greater deprivation had higher numbers of patients prescribed diabetes treatments, with the most deprived areas seeing around 349,000 more patients than the least deprived, the NHSBSA added.
Read more: Biggest shake-up for a decade’: More diabetics to access GLP-1s
The findings come as several online pharmacies face shortages of Mounjaro following manufacturer Eli Lilly’s announcement earlier this month that the price of the drug will rise by up to 170% in the UK from September.
In response to the price hike, the DH today (August 27) agreed redetermined “NHS reimbursement prices for all strengths of Mounjaro dispensed from September to reflect the new higher list prices”.
Meanwhile, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) last week revealed that “millions of people are set to benefit from earlier access to type 2 diabetes treatments”, such as Mounjaro, in “the biggest shake-up in care for a decade”.
