Medication shortages plague hospitals

If you have breast, gastric, ovarian, thyroid, small cell lung, lymphoma or other cancers, your access to effective treatment may well be choked off by a national drug shortage.

DailyFinance.com reported on Wednesday that the country has been suffering a shortage of many key medications in fighting cancers and for other medical procedures. The shortage resulted in a July warning from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices:

Healthcare providers are also feeling the heat from an alarming number of drug shortages of critically important medications. Drug shortages can compromise or delay important drug therapy and result in medication errors. According to reports submitted to ISMP, healthcare practitioners are concerned more than ever before about how frequent drug shortages are adversely affecting patient care and exhausting a tremendous amount of hospital resources to address the growing problem.

And DailyFinance.com reports on the continuing crisis:

A recent survey of health care professionals found the U.S. is experiencing drug shortages of “epic proportion that are often associated with third-world countries.” This unprecedented, and growing, shortage of critically important medications is affecting care and endangering patients’ lives.

“For the past year-and-a-half we’ve seen quite an escalation in the report of drug shortages,” says Bona Benjamin, director of Medication-Use Quality Improvement with the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). “And resolving the shortages is becoming more difficult.”

The shortages seem to be most acute in injectable medications, while oral medications which are commonly found at the community pharmacy generally have not been in short supply. The shortages impact vital medications such as chemotherapy, antibiotics, analgesics (painkillers), anesthetics and more.

So what’s the big deal on the shortage? DailyFinance sums it up thusly:

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices in July clearly warned of the severe problem. An ISMP survey of more than 1,800 health care practitioners (68% of them pharmacists) from July to September revealed at least two deaths as a result of a morphine shortage when a substitute was misused.

Respondents were most alarmed by the use of less desirable, unfamiliar and often more expensive alternative drugs. They were concerned of potential for errors, poor patient outcomes or preventable adverse drug events. For example, using a substitute of an unavailable drug resulted in an overdosing error that led to the death of a 16-year-old boy in an emergency room, ISMP President Michael Cohen wrote in July.

Ruthanne Sudderth, manager of public affairs for the Michigan Health and Hospital Association, says the group has just become aware of the problem.

“I was advised that drug shortages in hospitals is an issue of which we have very recently become aware. However, we are only in the beginning stages of exploring whether, and to what extent, it is a problem that Michigan will need to address,” Sudderth said in an email to Michigan Messenger.

Complicating the issue, while the shortage is impacting health care, and as indicated above resulted in deaths, the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medications and their production is powerless to direct drug companies to manufacture more of the short supplied drugs.