Five Ways Health Authorities Hope To End Medicine Shortages
(MENAFN- Swissinfo)
Authorities in many countries are scrambling for solutions to mounting shortages of medicine. Will any of them work?
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January 31, 2025 - 09:00
11 minutes
Jessica covers the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to big global companies and their impact in Switzerland and abroad. She's always looking for a Swiss connection with her native San Francisco and will happily discuss why her hometown has produced some of the greatest innovations but can't seem to solve its housing crisis.
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My specialty is telling stories, and decoding what happens in Switzerland and the world from accumulated data and statistics. An expatriate in Switzerland for several years, I have also worked as a multimedia journalist for the Swiss national broadcaster.
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Как можно было бы решить проблему нехватки лекарств?
Read more: Как можно было бы решить проблему нехватки лекарств
If you haven't been told by a pharmacist in the last few years that your prescription medicine isn't available, you should consider yourself lucky. In Switzerland, some 700 medications from antibiotics to painkillers are currently in short supplyExternal link at pharmacies.
The country is far from alone. Countries on all continents are reporting shortages of a range of medicine and their troubling effects on patients. In Mexico, for instance, multiple deaths were reported after shortages of morphine led doctors to draw multiple dosesExternal link from a single vial. In Europe, medicine shortages increased 20-fold from 2000 to 2018 and worsened after the pandemic upended supply chains. Medicine isn't just missing more often, report pharmacists, but also for longer periods of time.
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“We [pharmacists] have been complaining about shortages for years,” said Ilaria Passarani, who heads the Pharmaceutical Group of the European Union, representing more than 400,000 community pharmacists.“The situation has gotten so bad that it now has the attention of policymakers and the media.”
Pharmacists have become much better at troubleshooting – looking for alternatives or rationing supplies. These are only band-aids though, and increasingly costly ones. In Europe, pharmacists set aside 10 hours External link a week just looking for solutions to medicine shortages.
Health authorities globally are now debating possible solutions, including some that address the root causes of shortages such as the globalised medicine supply chain. Switzerland too is witnessing a growing push to address the issue.
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