Health Experts Seek Solution for Shortages of Live-Saving Drugs

In hopes of solving a much too common issue, experts in various fields gathered to publish recommendations for managing and preventing drug shortages, specifically for life-saving drugs.

Bioethicists, pharmacists, policymakers and cancer specialists were among the groups of healthcare experts that proposed these measures in the journal Pediatrics. Their blueprint focused on preventing the shortages of such drugs rather than reacting to shortages after they have already occurred.

An important shortage that the experts cited was that of chemotherapy drugs used for treating children with cancer. These drugs/therapies have proven success for high survival rates among the most common childhood cancers, leading the experts to vocalize that it is of the utmost importance to prevent future drug shortages. However, the experts' research and prevention plans weren't limited to chemotherapy drugs.

"Although our recommendations were developed with pediatric oncology in mind, and serve as a blueprint for preventing children with cancer from lacking access to essential life-saving medications, we believe that they apply more broadly across medicine to include pediatrics and adult medicine in general," said Yoram Unguru in this EurekAlert! article. Unguru is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at the Herman and Walter Samuelson Children's Hospital at Sinai, faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and coauthor of the experts' consensus statement regarding the drug shortage issue.

The statement declared six recommendations in order to help spur the development of policies that would prevent drug shortages and give equal drug access to patients, whether or not they are participants in research. Since some of the recommendations, such as equal drug access, are considered to be controversial, the authors provided potential barriers for each recommendation's implementation.

"The reasons for drug shortages are complex, but we must not lose sight of the fact that without access to these life-saving drugs, children and adults with cancer will almost certainly die," Unguru said in the same EurekAlert! article.

And since these drug shortages have increased the risk of death among the patients in question, this issue will most likely be of greater concern in the near future.

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