Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many medicine supply issue notifications her Department has received in each month since 2017.

There are around 14,000 licensed medicines, and the overwhelming majority are in good supply. However, the medicine supply chain is highly regulated, complex, and global and supply disruption is an issue which affects countries all around the world.

The Department’s medicines Discontinuations and Shortages (DaSH) portal was established in October 2020 to collect notifications from suppliers of potential supply issues. Data from before October 2020 cannot be provided as this information is not held. The following table shows the number of supply issue notifications added to the DaSH portal, each month since 2020: