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 tackle shortages of medications used to treat Parkinson’s disease.

Medicine supply issues are global in their nature and, while we cannot always prevent them, we have a range of well-established processes and tools to manage them when they arise and to mitigate risks to patients. There is a team in the Department that deals with medicine supply problems by working closely with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the pharmaceutical industry, NHS England and others operating in the supply chain. We also work with partners to ensure alternative treatments are available to patients until their usual treatments are back in stock.

The Department has been notified of a discontinuation of apomorphine (APO-go PFS) 50mg/10ml pre-filled syringes from September 2025 used in the management of Parkinson’s Disease. Alternative formulations of apomorphine remain available for patients and management guidance has been issued to the National Health Service.

On 11 August, we published a policy paper titled Managing a robust and resilient supply of medicines. This marks the beginning of a new phase of work planned and aims to provide greater transparency of the further actions that the Department and NHS England are taking to protect patients from medicines shortages and strengthen medicines supply chain resilience. The paper is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/managing-a-robust-and-resilient-supply-of-medicines/managing-a-robust-and-resilient-supply-of-medicines