79-year-old José Hermans has been taking the drug Apocard for more than 20 years to suppress her heart rhythm disorders. “I find that if I forget to take it, I feel it. I really need them,” she explains in a report by VTM NIEUWS.
José now has about two weeks left of her stock and hopes to be able to buy a new box at the pharmacy, but at the moment there is a major shortage of Apocard. The medicine is no longer in stock in almost any pharmacy.
“There have been problems for months,” responds pharmacist Tom Smeets. “Sometimes something comes in, other times it doesn’t. There is immediate stress about the next delivery.”
It is sometimes so bad that Tom has to ask his own customers to exchange pill strips with each other. “Older people were going away on holiday and I would never dare let them leave without that medicine,” Tom explains. That’s why he checked which customers were using the drug and called them to ask if they could spare some pill strips.
In addition, people who cannot live without Apocard try to solve the stock problem themselves by obtaining an extra box.