NHS: Drugs
(asked on 20th March 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the UK’s preparedness for medicine shortages caused by future pandemics or international disruptions.
The resilience of United Kingdom supply chains is a key priority, and the Department and NHS England are committed to helping to build long term supply chain resilience for medicines. We are continually learning and seeking to improve the way we work to both manage and help prevent supply issues and avoid shortages.
The Department, working closely with NHS England, is taking forward a range of actions to further improve our ability to mitigate and manage shortages and strengthen our resilience. As part of that work, we continue to engage with industry, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and other colleagues across the supply chain as we progress work to co-design and deliver solutions. However, medicine shortages are a complex and global issue and everyone in the supply chain has a role to play in addressing them, and any action will require a collaborative approach.
The Department also undertakes significant proactive risk evaluation to assess readiness against threats that could lead to potential disruption of medical supply chains. As part of this, the Department has participated in and led on a number of preparedness exercises, spanning across nationwide loss of power, cyber-attacks, and global pandemics, to test and improve our ability to respond to supply disruption.
In early August, the Department published a policy paper, Managing a robust and resilience supply of medicines, which provides greater transparency of the supply chains we rely on, the actions we take to protect patients from medicines shortages when they occur, and the steps we are taking to enhance resilience in our supply chains. This paper is available at the following link: