Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will confirm that Serious Medicines Shortage Protocols will not be appropriate for epilepsy treatments and that will be included in published guidance on Serious Medicines Protocols.

A Serious Shortage Protocol is an additional tool to manage and mitigate medication shortages and may be used in the exceptional and rare situation when other measures have been exhausted or are likely to be ineffective.

As the explanatory memorandum of the amending Statutory Instrument acknowledges, Protocols for therapeutic or generic equivalents will not be suitable for all medicines and patients. For example, those types of protocols would not be suitable for treatments for epilepsy or treatments requiring biological products where the medicines that are prescribed need to be prescribed by brand for clinical reasons. In these cases, patients would always be referred back to the prescriber for any decision about their treatment before any therapeutic or generic alternative is supplied.