Medicines Shortages

CPH understands the difficulties community pharmacy is experiencing due to the impact that continued supply problems has on your workload and your interactions with patients.

Community pharmacy teams are often put in a very difficult situation and most are having to work far harder than usual to obtain supplies of medicines for their patients; leading to delays for patients needing the affected medicines and an increased workload for both the community pharmacy team and GP practices.

Nationally, CPE is seeking improvements to the current price concessions system following significant concerns raised by pharmacy contractors about the unsustainable level of prices, imposed by DHSC in the past few months, for certain medicines and has sent a strong and clear message back to Government that pharmacies cannot subsidise the NHS medicines bill, escalating this within the DHSC and insisting that they find urgent solutions.

To hear more on how the current price concessions system operates, pharmacy teams can now access a recording of CPE’s recent webinar here.

We would strongly encourage all community pharmacy contractors to report the following to CPE on a regular basis:

        • Report issues where the product can only be obtained at a price higher than the Drug Tariff listed price using CPE’s online form;
        • Report any new medicine shortages not listed on the SPS website using CPE’s online reporting form.

Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire LMC and Community Pharmacy Hertfordshire agreed a medicines shortages form to help support communications between GP practices and community pharmacies. It is very important that this form is used by pharmacies to communicate supply issues with the GP practices to advise them of the duration of the shortage and to suggest an alternative to be supplied.

You could supply a copy of this form to the patient if all other forms of communication with the GP practice have been exhausted and the patient feels that they require their medication and the change to be implemented urgently.