Why doesn’t the NHS know where its medicines are?

When I lost my insulin, no part of the UK health service could help me. NHS 111 sent me to a hospital emergency department, the hospital sent me to pharmacies, the pharmacies sent me back to hospital. Ten hours later, I finally found the insulin I needed to treat my type 1 diabetes—not from the NHS, but from a friend who had some spare.That day, as my blood sugar levels climbed, I came face-to-face with the well documented problem of UK drug shortages. But my experience also highlights a less well documented aspect of what is now recognised as the “distressing new normal”1: the lack of visibility of these shortages across the health service.Neither prescribing GPs nor dispensing pharmacists can see in real time where medicine stock is—and isn’t—available, a blind spot that means patients are sent on “wild goose chases”2 to source potentially life saving drugs by themselves if…