With the number of concessions granted by DHSC in October at just 106, the lowest number since May 2022, we wondered if this was a signal of a reduction in the number of shortages or if it was just a blip?
To try and understand this issue we needed to get some way of understanding the concessions that weren’t granted. Without plaguing community Pharmacy England (PSNC as was), we wanted to get an empirical measure of this. It occurred to us that when shortages happen, the average market price usually exceeds the drug tariff in that month. So we could use that as a measure of a relatively severe shortage.
Therefore, we collected all the English drug tariff prices over the last 10 years and matched them against the average market prices for the same products over the same time period (all the data came from our BPPI online service). Then we counted the number of times the average market price for a product exceeded the drug tariff. The results showed that of all the products which suffered price spikes due to shortages only about 29% were granted concessions. In the remaining 71% no concession was granted.
This suggests that pharmacies are left to deal with shortages and price spikes as best they can without any further help from the DHSC.
It is also noticeable that the two lines, price spikes and concessions very nearly parallel each other. This again makes us think that DHSC are very aware of the price spikes, but for their own reasons don’t grant concessions in all cases. So in answer to our own question, looking at the graph there is no sign that the number of shortages is going down, rather it looks as if we are in a period of stability which started in Jan 2022 and could end years in the future.