I remember when there was no shortage of prescription medication.

[ArseInTheCoOpWindow]

And now it’s so difficult to get!

ADHD meds are a fucking nightmare
eye drops
HRT ( which was meant to have been sorted)

Why is this happening? 15 years ago it was unheard of.

Revered Govt?! Do you think they care if you can't get your ADHD meds?!

They couldn't care less.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow

Because when we were young the meds that existed were made here. Not that there was half of what there is today.

For adhd meds there is a national checker available for certain pharmacies

Bar that it's the independent pharmacies (I recommend inner city areas for it)

Also get the meds changed from the company / brand to the actual medication

I am on elvanse 30mg but if it says adult as it originally did I couldn't get the 30mg child dose which is exactly the same

They changed the prescription to the actual drug name which I can not spell but it has been far easier

No l don’t think they give a shit! But they should. People not getting insulin and epilepsy medicine is awful.

We've been struggling with epilepsy meds for months, especially in liquid form, every month I expect a call from the pharmacy to say they haven't been able to get it due to supply problems. Sometimes we are lucky and we can get it directly from the hospital and some months we just can't get it.

I'm 61. I'm a Boomer. 1964 it finishes.

Look, I was a remainer and think Brexit was a huge mistake but this just isn’t true. It’s increased demand in both the cases of adhd and hrt. There are women all over Northern Europe moaning about struggling to get hrt meds, especially estradot.

It's under investigation for mental health side effects I believe.

I chatted to a friend who does know what's going on with medications and pharmacies. Although Brexit/import issues do play a part, the main issue is that the EU is stockpiling virtually all medicines and equipment and has been since the conflict in Ukraine started. A lot of medicines and equipment are manufactured in EU countries and the EU when giving out contracts, on behalf of all EU nations, makes sure that they get to dictate the terms such as they get first dibs on excess stock and that EU countries orders must be fulfilled before anyone else's.
The EU deny it of course but my friend (of 30+years standing) worked in Strasbourg for a long time and still works in medical procurement now and is constantly frustrated by the issue. The only reason I even asked them about the issue was that I'd noticed that our diabetic finger test strips only had two months left before they expired when I collected them from the pharmacy (already nearly 2 years from manufacture) and I was worried because of the waste - we couldn't possibly use 200 test strips in 8 weeks. So we in the UK get medicines and equipment that the EU is swapping out for newer stuff and this is returned to the drug companies to resell to other countries like the UK. It's not only the manufactured medicines that this happens with, it's also the chemicals used to make the drugs in the first place which is what's happened to things like HRT & ADHD manufacturing. At the end of last year there was a sudden shortage in diabetic pen needles and we were down to our last third of a box before our pharmacy found a supply. We also had the same issues with a new insulin pen and it took us 4 months to get a new one so we had to use a broken one for months.

Is she diabetic?

I just buy eye drops in Boots or online. They're not expensive.

DH has multiple prescriptions for RA and asthma. Not had any issues with any of them (including one that goes on the fridge, although brand recently changed on that one).

Australia has just issued a shortage notice for Estradot, estrogen patches for hrt which are preferred by many women as they are 10% of the size of other brands.

Obviously Australia is not in the EU.

Yes

Woah this is actually terrifying!

And this will be the cause of another clutch of shortages - medications stopped due to side effects.

Any proper government would be setting up a task force to solve this.

I work in a pharmacy as a dispenser. While I’m quite new to the pharmaceutical world (first year), I’m shocked by the shortage of so many medications. For some medications there really are NO replacements - Trulicity and many of the controlled drugs. Our pharmacy has two suppliers, Alliance and AAH. I attempt to order the same items at least twice a day - but there’s just a big red dot on these drugs. No message conveying when it could be back, no waiting list, nothing. In fact Alliance have now started demanding evidence of scripts (with confidential details missing obviously), because there’s such a shortage and they can’t trust bigger pharmacies to not buy in more than required “for just in case”. It’s absolute shambles. I completely empathise with customers who say they need their medication - I have no reason to withhold it. I am in this profession because I like helping people feel better. But the amount of abuse we get - people threatening us, people demanding their medications or “they will just come in and cause a scene until they’re given it”, people threatening to commit suicide if we don’t supply the drugs. I do understand their frustration, I have complex health needs myself. But no one cares that I’m a minimum wage worker - I’m told daily to “loan them drugs or I will be sorry”. It’s shocking. But at the end of the day I still try my best to help them because they are in pain and that is the job I chose.
We are paid minimum wage though, we can’t issue scripts the surgeries haven’t sent us and if the only two suppliers are out of stock, please don’t shoot the messenger. Bit of a derail there sorry - just come home after another long day of being told it’s bullshit we haven’t got everything in stock and how the hell can we just close over Easter when we are supplying vital drugs. Well, request your meds in time and as long as there is no shortage we will try our best to get them to you asap.

@baileybrosbuildingandloan you are kidding? My DD has severe mental health issues

We need to build our pharmaceutical capacity then.

Bloody Brexit.

@lifeonapersiancarpet
Indeed. We used to have a lot of pharmaceutical manufacturing here in the UK but the big medicines companies closed the plants to go to 'cheaper' countries/lower taxes etc. Any government in power would have to offer huge concessions on taxes for them to build here new plants and make drugs here. In response the EU would make it very, very difficult for them and usually threats of 'restrictions' are enough to deter any thoughts of opening up here or anywhere else.
When you think back to the beginning of Covid, the UK threw everything at finding a method of easy testing and then a vaccine and our country achieved that really quite quickly. But...we didn't have the capacity to make vaccines in big enough capacity for everyone and the company that WE paid to make the vaccine had to transfer manufacture to a country in the EU. The EU already furious that they'd been 'beaten' then tried to dictate where the vaccine went and that the UK should submit their demands even though the UK had done the majority of the work. In the face of threats to future licenses/being forcibly taken over the medicine companies capitulated and have done so ever since. My friend said that it was touch & go at some points as to whether the UK would actually get the vaccines at all and said that dealing with the EU was like trying to deal with a rabid animal. They left their job soon after.

Yes and recently we've had a lot of conflict going on and people seem to forget that drugs have to be transported from one place to another. Some insulin is manufactured in Russia and China for example.
You really think the government isn't doing anything? Of course they are but it's not just in this country that are having issues.