Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to prevent the interruption of supply of repeat medications to patients.

The Department understands that maintaining access to medicines is vitally important to many people in this country.

The Department’s Medicine Supply team has well established processes to manage and mitigate the small number of supply problems that may arise at any one time due to manufacturing or distribution issues. The team also works on longer term strategies to ensure a more robust supply chain including the introduction of a mandatory requirement on the pharmaceutical industry to notify shortages and the restriction of certain medicines being parallel exported out of the United Kingdom.