Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to tackle shortages of (a) Adalat, (b) Nifedipine and (c) other common medicines.

The vast majority of medicines are not subject to supply problems and every day over 2 million prescription items are successfully dispensed in England.

Where problems do occur the Department’s Medicines Supply Team has well established procedures to deal with medicine shortages and works closely with all stakeholders to help prevent shortages and to ensure that the risks to patients are minimised when they do arise.

We are aware of ongoing supply issues with the Adalat range of the drug nifedipine due to manufacturing capacity constraints. We have been working closely with all suppliers of generic and other brands of nifedipine to maintain overall supply of this medicine to patients and have provided regular updates about the situation to the National Health Service.

We will continue to work closely with all manufacturers of nifedipine preparations to monitor the overall supply situation to ensure supplies continue to remain available.