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Medicine shortages

The unavailability of medicines continues to be on the rise in Europe and it has a tremendous impact on patients. Medicine shortages occur across all healthcare settings and involve both essential life-saving medicines and very commonly used medicines.

Community pharmacists are very concerned about this phenomenon, which can compromise patients’ health. Moreover, pharmacies and pharmacists invest a lot of resources dealing with shortages which constitutes not only a financial burden but also a loss of opportunity to spend time with other patient-centred tasks and to improve the quality of care.

Today, community pharmacists still manage to ensure continuity of care and minimise the impact on their patients’ health status in most cases. However, several barriers should be removed to further support community pharmacists in this key role, considering that the impact on practice is increasing every day.

Through its updated Position Paper, PGEU outlines community pharmacists recommendations to strengthen supply resilience and mitigate the negative effects of medicine shortages, including:

  • The implementation of a common definition of medicine shortages across the EU and across the full supply chain to better identify and evaluate medicine shortages and to accelerate a coordinated response.

  • Ensuring that manufacturers have robust shortages prevention and mitigation plans in place and that they report shortages timely.

  • Allowing community pharmacists to make full use of their skills, knowledge and experience to find alternative treatments for their patients, being it by dispensing the same medicine in a different formulation or pack size, performing generic substitution or therapeutic substitution, through an adequate shared decision-making process or compounding.

  • Enhancing transparency and authorities’ oversight of the upstream supply chain.

  • Fostering EU solidarity and coordination among Member States to facilitate the redistribution of medicines to those in need.

  • Optimizing European and national stockpile management by progressively building buffer stocks to mitigate the impact of shortages without generating unnecessary waste.

  • Better using procurement to secure long-term availability, encouraging the use of MEAT criteria and splitting tender awards in procurement processes to achieve supply chain diversity and reduce downward price pressure while improving demand forecasting from public sources and buyers.

  • Clarifying and better enforcing manufacturers’ and wholesale distributors’ supply obligations.

  • Evaluating and addressing the impact of parallel trade and manufacturer-initiated supply quotas and allocations.


In addition, PGEU publishes every year a report on medicine shortages (available below), based on the results of an EU-wide survey to PGEU members on the topic.

PGEU continues actively contributing to the discussion on medicines shortages at EU level, being a constructive partner in the reform of the EU Pharmaceutical Legislation and as a co-chair of the Critical Medicines Alliance.
Downloads
PGEU position paper on medicine shortages 2024 Community pharmacists recommendations on medicine shortages – one pager 2024 PGEU Medicine Shortages Report 2023 PGEU Survey on Medicine Shortages 2022 Results PGEU Survey on Medicine Shortages 2021 Results PGEU response to EC Public Consultation on the revision of the general EU Pharmaceutical Legislation PGEU Survey on Medicine Shortages 2020 Results PGEU Position Paper on the Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe PGEU response to Public Consultation Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe PGEU response to Roadmap Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe PGEU Position Paper on Medicine Shortages 2019 PR PGEU releases Position Paper on Medicine Shortages 2017 Supply chain statement on Medicine Shortage Information

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