Delivery bottlenecks
Lately, some drugs have been difficult to come by. This is a big problem for patients, doctors and pharmacists. The cause is often delivery bottlenecks from the production sites.
The majority of pharmacists spend around a tenth of their working time looking after drugs that cannot be delivered. There is no improvement in sight. It was particularly dramatic in October last year when manufacturers reported 60 bottlenecks.
Pharmacists struggle with the problem on a daily basis. You are checking stocks at wholesalers sometimes several times a day, exchanging ideas with other pharmacists and sending the patients to where the required medication is still available. For the This is a negative business for pharmacists, but what they like to do for their patients.
Unfortunately, the same drugs are usually missing in all pharmacies.
Nothing will change that quickly.
Because the drug shortage is a lesson in globalization. Since the end of the nineties there has been increasing pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to offer off-patent drugs, so-called generics, at lower prices. Therefore, the production of the active ingredients is concentrated in fewer and fewer, but ever larger factories, which are often located in India or China. It is much cheaper to produce here, and mass production reduces costs. But if one of these mega-factories breaks down due to a defect or because a production line is contaminated, this is felt by pharmacies all over the world. The pain reliever ibuprofen, for example, is only manufactured in six factories worldwide.
In the long term, production is to be brought back to Europe. Often, discount agreements between health insurers and pharmaceutical manufacturers force pharmacists to dispense a very specific drug. That should be more flexible. In addition, manufacturers and wholesalers should build up stocks. But whether these measures will help - and especially when - is completely open.
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Left:
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- Press release Österr. Chamber of Pharmacists
- Federal Association of German Pharmacists' Associations
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Source: NDR
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