Community pharmacies need better support in managing drug shortages, a hospital lead this week (November 5) told parliamentarians at an inquiry into medicines security.
Richard Bowers, lead clinician for medicines procurement and supply at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, made the comment after being asked for suggestions to improve the “resilience of pharmaceutical services in secondary care”.
Read more: House of Lords launches inquiry into medicine shortages
“It’s an interesting answer for me, because I think if I could do anything, it would be to improve the support for community pharmacies,” Bowers said.
And when later asked by the panel for his three recommendations, Bowers reiterated first of all that community pharmacies “should be given more support in managing shortages”.
Creon shortages
Bowers told the inquiry that “so many” drug supply issues occurring at community pharmacies “then bounce back to the hospitals”, citing recent shortages of pancreatic cancer treatment Creon as an example.
Creon “was just not available to community pharmacies”, he said - and patients who had “reached the point of exhaustion” seeking the drug at pharmacies eventually sourced it from his hospital, which had it in stock.
Read more: DH confirms cancer drug stock secured five months after warning
“In a month we were supplying that drug to three times the normal number of patients,” he said, adding that “they were getting treated - but at significant cost, operationally and financially, to the trust”.
Bowers said that while “not all of [his] secondary care colleagues would thank [him] for saying it”, he feels that if “primary care could be resourced and have more resilience, the pressure on secondary care would be lower”.
“Community pharmacy is sinking”
Bowers also told the inquiry that the resources available to secondary care “in terms of senior support, decision making” and “intelligence on the supply chain” are “a level greater than community pharmacy can access”.
“It feels [like] community pharmacy is sinking when it comes to shortages, so anything that could be done to help them gain that information we would support,” he said.
Read more: TB patients to be ‘prioritised’ amid drug shortage
He added that the “majority of medicines” used in hospitals are contracted for them by NHS England (NHSE) and “often ringfenced within the wholesalers for secondary care” - and that hospitals are “officially not allowed” to distribute them into primary care “without authorisation”.
“That can be very challenging, when we’re saying such and such wholesaler does have it, and the community pharmacy is saying, ‘no, it doesn’t’,” he said.
Understanding how to “share that stock best across the system without breaching contracting regulations” is “worth further exploration”, he added.
Read more: Drug shortages ‘unsustainable burden’ on pharmacy, MPs warn
It comes after a recent study revealed that the decreasing prices of off-patent antibiotics risk “limiting patient access” to essential medicines in Europe.
Drug company Viatris, which sponsored the independent research, last month said that “rising production costs and persistent price decreases” are among the factors driving shortages of key antibiotics.
The study of 16 European countries including the UK discovered that between 2020 and 2024, the average price of the top 10 most-used off-patent antibiotics fell by 10% despite “sharp increases” in inflation and the cost of production.
