Drug shortages in health care institutions: perspectives in early 2012.

Eggertson highlighted the problem of drug shortages in Canada and described initiatives of the Canadian Pharmacists Association, hospital pharmacists, and drug manufacturers to address the problem. Many stakeholders have underscored the importance of the drug shortage problem and its risks, but few quantitative data have been published. 3,4 A few regulatory agencies (e.g., the US Food and Drug Administration 5 and the Agence française de sécurité sanitaire des produits de santé in France 6) and a few professional organizations and associations 8 and the Canadian Pharmacists Association 9) have published online guidelines and lists of product shortages to make it easier to manage these events. In Canada, the Pharmacy Practice Research Unit of the Centre hospitalier universitaire Sainte-Justine launched an open-access website in February 2011 that provides a progress report on all drug shortages in health care institutions (see www.fridaypm.ca [English] and www.vendredipm.ca [French]). Many of these shortages also affect outpatients using oral formulations. Initially, the website was being updated every 2 weeks by our research team using a list of drug shortages provided by the wholesaler McKesson Canada, under contract to SigmaSanté (the group purchasing agent for hospital group purchases in the Montréal and Laval areas and the Eastern Townships of Quebec) and through self-reporting by hospitals. Starting in January 2012, the website was being updated directly by the manufacturers on a voluntary pilot basis; doing so became mandatory on April 1, 2012, according to contractual terms and conditions with SigmaSanté. This real-time updating should make it possible to immediately display progress reports for all of the stakeholders. Our research unit has been interested in drug shortages for more than a year. In a recently published retrospective study, 10 we compiled a list of all the drug shortages experienced by health care institutions in the Montréal and Laval areas and the Eastern Our latest data indicate that there were a total of 429 drug shortages in this 12-month period in 2010–2011; the corresponding numbers of drug shortages were 493 in The number of manufacturers involved in drug shortages has declined (41 in 2010–2011 versus 70 over the period 2006–2010), undoubtedly because of mergers and integration or closing of certain drug manufacturers. Most of the documented shortages came from generic drug manufacturers, and their relative ranking has remained similar. In both periods, most therapeutic classes were involved in drug shortages. For the 12-month study period in 2010–2011, drug classes involved …