Posted by Michael Wonder on 28 Apr 2020
How medicine supplies are managed during COVID-19 crisis
28 April 2020 - During the COVID-19 outbreak, one of the things that has been top of mind for me as a GP has been whether or not our national "stockpile" of medications is going to be adequate to see us through the coming months until the world returns to something closer to normality.
Every few days I receive some form of communication from either a pharmacy, a patient or PHARMAC, stating that a particular drug has either no or limited availability, and it has made me acutely aware how vulnerable as a country we are to disruptions of global supply chains.
The reality is that New Zealand is a very small, and geographically isolated country, and purchases only 0.1% of the world's pharmaceutical products.
