Rochester, N.Y. — A nationwide shortage of more than 200 drugs has hospitals working to find alternatives to treat their patients. Most of these drugs are generic injections, but many of them are life-saving medications and experts say patients’ lives are at risk.
Strong Memorial Hospital is also feeling the affects of the shortage and they’ve had to adjust accordingly.
“Instead of using Drug A we can use Drug B because they have very similar effects,” says Curtis Haas, the director of pharmacy at Strong. “But the dosing might be different, the procedure and how you give it might be different. However, whenever you do that, it introduces a potential for error to occur.”
Some of the drugs in short supply include drugs used for chemotherapy. One of them, Toxal, has no other drug that’s similar or does the job as well.
“Some of the drugs used in the treatment of cancer, there haven't been other good alternatives or the alternatives that are available are not preferred,” says Haas. “It's definitely a public health crisis in my mind, because the medications we need to save lives might not be available.”
The Associated Press’ review of industry reports showed that at least 15 deaths in the past 15 months have been caused by the drug shortage.
Haas feels that there’s no real way of telling if the deaths were attributed to the drug shortage. He says at Strong, they’ve been fortunate to have found good alternatives to the drugs in short supply and to his knowledge, the lack of drugs has not led to any deaths.
“We look very hard for alternative ways to get the drugs to avoid these shortages,” Haas says. “We also developed a process of tracking and keeping minimum quantities of drugs on our shelves and creating a criticality score so we can plan plenty ahead of time.”
The Food and Drug Administration says there are several reasons for the shortage. First, many production plants were shut down after drugs were contaminated. Also, many companies have stopped manufacturing some of the drugs because profit margins are slim and not worth the cost of producing them. There is also a lack of some of the raw materials needed to produce the drugs.
Haas says the problem started two and half years ago and has only gotten worse.
“I say this is our new normal. This is just a part of the way we have to do business because it doesn’t seem to be improving.”
There is currently a bill before Congress that would require drug manufacturers to notify the FDA of a potential drug shortage six months ahead of time. The bill would also give the FDA more power to bring in imported drugs or materials to make drugs to improve availability.
