Shortages of essential drugs are threatening to become a crisis in the United States, health care providers say.
While cancer drugs have been most publicized recently, experts in pharmacy say they often find themselves scrambling to find common generic medications such as antibiotics and fear having to resort to rationing.
They say only a national effort to bring generic drug manufacturing back from overseas, among other steps, will help relieve the problem, which mostly affects injectable drugs, including chemotherapy and cardiac medications.
“It is not just cancer, said Dr. Peter Yu, physician-in-chief of the Hartford HealthCare Cancer Institute in Hartford, Connecticut. “It’s pediatrics, it’s infectious diseases, it’s rheumatology.”
Yu said the American Society of Clinical Oncology looked into the problem when he was president in 2014-15. “In part what we learned is it wasn’t just oncology; it really is a health economics issue about how drugs are paid for and manufactured and distributed in the United States and the world,” he said.
“We are experiencing it ourselves across Hartford HealthCare,” Yu said. “We treat hundreds of patients a day with chemotherapy. We tried to keep a several weeks’ supply of our chemotherapy drugs on hand and we’ve been down to as low as a two-day supply, which makes us extremely nervous.”
Yu said health care systems rely on a few large distributors, “big names like Cardinal Health, American BioSource and McKesson, and they’re unable to tell us when they can deliver supplies. We call every day and they say, we’re not sure we can distribute your order.”
He said Hartford HealthCare has been able to shift supplies among its seven hospitals to avoid a total shortage, but “there’s very little margin for error here, or very limited.”
‘A spike in shortages’
“What we’re seeing now is a spike in shortages,” said Eric Arlia, vice president for pharmacy services at Hartford…
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