WaveData MD, Charles Joynson shares his analysis…..
It seems relatively obvious to say that if there is a serious shortage there probably won’t be much stock of any form around, generic, brand, parallel import or short dated. This probably means that any short dated stock that was in the supply chain, even with very little time left before expiry, will be used up very quickly when there’s a major shortage. Patients after all will be standing at pharmacy counters demanding their medication, seriously concerned about their health. The pharmacist or dispenser will be desperate to get stock for them as quickly as possible, even if it is a different manufacturer, brand, country of origin or has a very short date. If the patient is going to use it very quickly, being short dated probably doesn’t matter so much.
So is the amount of short dated stock around a good indication of where we are with shortages?
Comparing the two lines on the chart it does look like they tie in relatively closely, even though we’ve had so show one in reverse order to emphasise the correlation.
We also looked at Atorvastatin which has been a major supply headache in recent times. We found that there was a spike in the availability of short dated products peeking (October 2020) and declining in advance of the concessions. So it is possible that short dated availability may give advance warning of serious shortages of individual products. We will need to investigate further to see if this is really true.