Drug Shortage Can Affect Patient Care and More

For more than a decade, drug shortages in the US has been a major problem for small and large healthcare institutions. The FDA drug shortage data indicates several medical areas with drug shortage problems that could lead to serious patient rationing.

Drug shortage arises from more than one reason that include:

Manufacturing problems

Shortage of raw materials/resources

Regulatory issues

Natural disasters

Voluntary recalls

Supply chain or any other business-related issues

The first and the foremost entity that suffers from drug shortages is the patient. Hospitals are also pushed to tackle compromised patient care and a long list of operational troubles that can affect their bottom line and deliver optimal patient outcomes. Read on to find out more.

Increased operational costs

Drug shortage leads to increased costs through amplified labor needs. A survey by the Institute of Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) in 2010 revealed that 78% of the hospitals experience significant increase in costs when procuring comparable drugs. From accommodating alternative products into their system to increasing quality checks, more labor is needed throughout the process. Additionally, the alternative therapeutic drugs are also much more expensive than the conventional drugs used for any particular treatment.

A more complex and inefficient healthcare system

Drug shortages are so alarming that it often takes precedence over the core activities of the hospital. Drug management permeates through all layers of hospital operations, thus using up more resources than required and complicating the entire healthcare delivery system. Other drug management personnel spend much of their time in communicating with manufacturers, arranging alternatives, modifying clinical guidelines, changing or updating their databases and thus offering less attention to high quality patient care.

Deteriorating hospital reputation

Use of alternative drugs comes with safety risks and can cause dissatisfaction among patients. In some cases, it might lead to compromised results and side effects. For instance, some hospitals were forced to delay or modify chemotherapy treatments for cancer patients due to drug shortages. The available drugs where redirected to patients with the best prognosis thus leading to dissatisfaction among the other groups of patients waiting to get treated.

Lack of optimized performance from the medical practitioners

Alternative drugs can cause a lot of confusion and complexity due to varying concentration of ingredients, alternative additional agents or a different product form. In such cases, nurses and doctors who are unfamiliar with the new product often tend to make mistakes or are unfamiliar with drug interactions and toxicities. While more than 50% of hospitals are warned about the FDA drug shortage data in advance, there are still several complex problems faced by most healthcare providers. Careful planning and proactive procuring of drugs is the key to solving the issue.

If you are looking for FDA backorder drugs, then the author of this article recommends MedShorts.