Abstract/Summary

Drugs can become short in supply for many reasons including increased demand and reduced production. Drug shortages have the potential to impact patients and pharmacists. This study aimed to highlight the challenges pharmacists face and the constraints of how they manage drug shortages. An online survey was designed with its link distributed electronically to community pharmacists in the UK with the assistance of pharmacy organizations during the period of September to December 2021. Survey data was analysed using descriptive statistics. A total of 83% of the respondents (n = 100) were experiencing drug shortages 3 or more times per week and more than 70% of these spent 1–3 h per week dealing with them. A total of 93% of the respondents indicated the issue of drug shortages was a problem for them and 61% reported it has worsened since the start of the pandemic. In addition, 65% of the respondents believed that drug shortages had had an impact on patient care. Drug shortages were shown to impact on the pharmacists’ workloads with a potential to affect quality of patient care. There was a variation between how pharmacists dealt with drug shortages, which needs to be explored further with the reasons behind it.