Never before has the medicine shortage in the Netherlands been as great as this year: 1,179 times a medicine was not available for at least two weeks in the first six months of this year. That reports pharmacist organization KNMP Monday. In the whole of last year, 1,514 medicines were not available for a longer period of time. These include a remedy for gout, antibiotics and medicines for various heart conditions. As a result, large groups of patients can no longer assume that their medicine is available in pharmacies.
In January of this year, the KNMP already sounded the alarm: never before were the medicine shortages as large and long-lasting as in 2022. The shortages have been rising for ten years, but in recent years things have been going fast. In 2018, there was still a shortage of more than seven hundred medicines. “We hoped – to be honest against our better judgment – that we had reached the absolute limit last year,” says Aris Prins, chairman of the pharmacists’ association. “But it is significantly worse. We can’t go on like this.” It takes pharmacists a lot of time to come up with solutions for their patients and to prepare or import alternatives themselves.
The shortages arise from problems with the production, distribution and quality of the resources. Many raw materials come from countries such as China and India, because production is cheaper there. If problems arise there, for example due to contaminated raw materials, all customers will be in a pinch.
But KNMP chairman Prins also sees more and more resources that are no longer available only in the Netherlands, such as the gout medicine allopurinol. This is because the major health insurers in the Netherlands have designated one preferred medicine for different medicines, often the cheapest option. In principle, alternative medicines are not reimbursed. “If that manufacturer is unexpectedly unable to deliver and such a medicine is therefore not in stock, a major problem immediately arises, because alternatives are not or hardly available,” writes KNMP.
Also read this report in The Hague: Finding solutions for medicine shortages is now a day job for pharmacists