How to improve access to medicines for patients? A question that arises at a time when the number of reports of medication shortages or risks of medication shortages is increasing sharply. Illustration in Marseille.
:quality(50)/2023/07/07/64a7df4c5fe71_placeholder-36b69ec8.png)
Published
Reading time: 2 min
:quality(50)/2024/02/22/des-tiroirs-vides-de-medicaments-en-rupture-de-stock-dans-une-pharmacie-65d70c323310a575239246.jpg)
The shelves are full in a pharmacy in the 2nd arrondissement in Marseille, but it’s a different story when you move into the reserve. “There is only one box on the antibiotic shelf”, explains Caroline. This situation has lasted for at least a year, explains the pharmacist. The government has published “its road map” while 5,000 reports of shortages or risk of shortages of medicines were made in 2023, a figure up 31% compared to the previous year.
The objective for the government is to anticipate disruptions and to communicate better with patients and pharmacists who, together, are demanding concrete responses from the executive. In more than 30 years of activity, Caroline has never seen this. She estimates that she is missing 40% of her products. “There is a prescription coming, I have vapors because I know that I will not be able to honor it. I am sure that he will have at least one or two products that I would not have”says the pharmacist from Marseille.
“We don’t just have that to do”
A shortage that even concerns prescriptions where there is only one medication. “It happened to me recently to have a prescription for antibiotics and actually go to five or six pharmacies before findingexplains Agnès. Each time, they told me that there was certainly some somewhere, that it was not broken.” This also happened to Jacqueline, who deplores a lack of information: “We ask at the pharmacy and they tell us: ‘Ah but I don’t know where you want to go to find it.’ We don’t just have to do that.”
Pharmacists, like Caroline, have to use trickery to get supplies. “The wholesaler manages to have ten boxes of antibiotics and if there are 20 pharmacies wanting them, they have to choose. Sometimes I pester every quarter of an hour, I try to order and sometimes I succeed . But it’s not nice to do that, I’m ashamed to say that.” A workload which represents, on average, twelve hours of additional work for pharmacists according to a study by their national union.
