Is the Drug Shortage Affecting Patient Care in Your Critical Care Unit?

Critical Care Nurse wants to hear from you on this issue. Go to www.ccnonline .org and click on the survey link (by March 31, 2012) to let us know whether this national problem has affected your workplace. Sporadic shortages of various pharmaceutical products in the United States are nothing new. But since the early 1990s, the prevalence, scope and negative repercussions of these shortages have escalated to critical levels, prompting not only heightened monitoring, but increasingly louder alarms regarding this already lethal problem. Just over the past few years, the number of drugs identified as in short supply or as completely unavailable has multiplied more than 6-fold from a 2006 total of 56 to more than 230 in 2011, with some knowledgeable sources projecting a sum of 360 drugs by the end of 2011, the highest number in history. In addition, a number of the medications listed as scarce or unavailable during 2010 remained locked in those categories throughout 2011.