NHS: Drug Shortages

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for my proposed promotion. My noble friend Lord Moylan has also raised pancreatic cancer a number of times. To be absolutely honest, this is one of those cases where we are on a journey. I think we have got on top of certain areas, such as prostate cancer, about which we have increased awareness to ensure we get detection early on, but we do not detect pancreatic cancer early enough and, unfortunately, it is then often too late. We are working on something to try to correct that. The noble Lord is quite right to bring it up, and I am happy to write to him to tell him exactly what we are doing.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I hope the Minister will revisit his department’s response to the Times today, which comes across as quite dismissive of genuine difficulties that many people across the country have with access to medicines. I encourage the Government to offer a service where people can report their individual experiences of shortages so that they can be aggregated into real-time public reports about what is happening across the country. If he wants an example of what this could look like, he could look at Downdetector, which does something similar for access to internet services.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I quizzed the team on exactly that Times newspaper report today, because like the noble Lord, they were saying that they did not recognise the numbers that the British Generic Manufacturers Association had produced. I wanted to understand why, and asked the team to sit down with them, and understand the differences, because one side or the other must be right. They are absolutely doing that, and will report back; I will be happy to update the House on the results of that.