Sir, – I read your article outlining how hormone replacement therapy is due to become available free of charge for women in Ireland (“Hundreds of thousands of women could access free HRT under new plans”, News, August 12th). I welcome any initiative that removes financial barriers to vital medicines, but this initiative ignores a very real problem – many products, including many brands of HRT, are currently “short”, ie not actually available for pharmacies to order from the wholesalers.
For example, Estradot and Evorel are two of the most widely prescribed HRT patches on the Irish market, and are not available in any strength for the past number of weeks from either of the two main wholesalers.
There is little point in initiatives to remove financial barriers to medicines if the medicines themselves are not actually available in the country.
The situation with the non-availability of HRT patches is replicated across many different drug classes, such as common antibiotics, blood pressure medications, digestive enzymes, eye drops, etc.
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The Health Products Regulatory Authority maintains a list of short items and as of today there are well over a hundred commonly prescribed medicines that are “short” in Ireland.
The Minister for Health needs to intervene to get the wholesale marketplace functioning as it should in order to allow pharmacists to be able to order the medicines that their customers need – otherwise the “shorts” will become more and more commonplace and these initiatives will become more and more pointless. – Yours, etc,
GORDON RYAN,
Pharmacist,
Rathmines Pharmacy,
Dublin 6.
