Abstract
Drug shortages have been a serious problem in Japan since February 2021, triggered by violation of the pharmaceutical manufacturing regulations by companies producing generic drugs. This study aimed to evaluate the usefulness of an institutional decision support protocol for the drug shortages; the protocol enables pharmacists in our hospital to change out-patient prescriptions when prescription queries are received from community pharmacies. We analyzed the records of prescription queries from community pharmacies regarding out-patient prescriptions in a five-month period before the beginning of the drug shortages and in a five-month period after the shortages began. We found that the ratio of the number of prescription queries due to unavailability of the medicine per out-patient prescription had significantly increased in the period after the onset of the drug shortages, from 0.06％ (38/66,792) to 0.57％ (398/70,104). The institutional protocol was applied to the majority (75.4％, 300/398) of the prescription queries due to unavailability of the medicine during the drug shortage. These results suggest that our institutional decision support protocol effectively reduced pharmacists’ workload by decreasing the time required to process prescription queries resulting from drug shortages.
