HRT drugs rationed to three months as supply crisis grows


Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) will be subject to emergency rationing measures as the supply crisis grows.

The Secretary of Health authorized new protocols, limiting prescriptions for key products to three months, in a bid to ensure there are enough for everyone.

Manufacturing and supply problems have fueled shortages of some hormone treatments, while demand increased by two-thirds last year.

On Friday night, one of the major manufacturers of HRT said that its supplies will not increase until June.

Besins Healthcare, which makes the popular Oestrogel treatment, said it planned to increase supplies in response to growing demand, but said it would take several months for this to happen.

In March, The Telegraph revealed a growing black market for HRT with women resorting to “bartering and swapping bottles” or paying £50 for a single pack. Since then, more and more women have told how they have been forced to share supplies or run from pharmacy to pharmacy to find supplies.

The team will address the shortage

On Friday, Sajid Javid said fixing the shortage would be a “national mission” as he deployed Madeleine McTernan, head of the vaccine task force, to lead a new team to tackle the HRT shortage.

Hours later, he ordered urgent steps to be taken to ensure the women can access supplies in the short term.

The Severe Shortage Protocols (SSP) will limit the supply of three key products – Oestrogel, Ovestin cream and Premique Low Dose – to three months.

The order, which is set to expire at the end of July, asks pharmacists to limit orders regardless of what the prescription says.

Until now, women have been able to have prescriptions for up to 12 months at a time.

Plans to reduce prescription charges for women on 12-month prescriptions have now been delayed until April 2023.

Officials said that any woman whose supply is limited to three months, despite having been issued a longer prescription, is not expected to pay a prescription charge until the order has been fully filled.

Imposing the limits would mean more women can access the drugs they want, officials said.

Women in some areas have already recounted how their supplies have been limited to a month.

‘A lifesaver for millions’

Javid said he would not hesitate to take “decisive action” to address the issues.

“This next step will ensure that women across the UK can reliably access this vital medicine and maintain this lifeline for millions of people in need,” she said.

Officials said the vast majority of HRT products, including alternatives to those affected, remain available.

On Friday night, a spokesperson for Besins Healthcare, which makes Oestrogel, said: “They are currently supplying double the amount supplied at this time last year. The goal is to meet demand, including increasing average quantity per prescription and growing demand, by June 2022.”

The manufacture of Oestrogel is a “complex multi-step process,” the spokesman added, “so it will take some time to ramp up capacity to meet the extraordinary demand.”

Women have already reported running out of medication and resorting to desperate measures to secure it.

Gayle Stevens-White, 46, a menopause coach from Farnham, said women were “on the brink of insanity” over the shortage. After switching to a different product herself, she had leftover bottles of HRT and has been sending them to those struggling to fill her prescriptions.

“I have this surplus stock that I’m sitting on, and I thought, well, I can’t let these women who are absolutely desperate [go without]. His mental health and his general well-being are very compromised,” she said.

“It would just go back to the chemicals anyway and then they would give it to the people who needed it, so I thought I’d cut out the middleman.”

Carolyn Harris, a Labor MP for Swansea East, who has campaigned for better access to medicine, said she had heard of women “driving up and down the motorway to change patches for gel”, while others bought “stuff really expensive on the internet. ”.

eBay listings for £60

The Telegraph has seen Oestrogel listed on eBay for £60, a sixfold increase on the typical prescription charge of £9.35.

Sam Menzies, 50, from Aberdeen, quit his job this week after being unable to get by without HRT. He was due to fly to London for a trip and after no local pharmacies had Oestrogel in stock, he visited pharmacies across the capital to try and secure the medicine from him.

“We finally found a chemist at Waterloo train station who had a bottle,” he said.

The chemist told him that he was “lucky” to get it. “I don’t feel so lucky, it’s not a word that crosses my mind right now,” he said.

Ms Harris said the surge in demand for HRT should not have come as a surprise to manufacturers or health officials.

“They knew it was coming, it is not something new, it has been built year after year. We are prescribing more HRT now per month than we were prescribing per year,” she said.

“Then why the hell have they allowed it to come to this situation?”

The SSPs, which expire on Friday, July 29, allow community pharmacists to dispense the three protocol-specified HRT products in lieu of a written prescription, without requiring a prescriber’s authorization.

Officials said this would “even out” the distribution of demand for products such as Oestrogel, which has recently experienced problems as demand increased.

They said that pharmacists were expected to use their professional judgment when deciding to apply the SSP and that patients should be consulted.



Reference-www.telegraph.co.uk

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