Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether they plan to create a list of critical medicines, and if so, when that list will be published.

The Department has no plans to create or publish a list of critical medicines in the United Kingdom.

Increasing resilience of UK medicines supply chains remains a priority for the Government. As part of work underway to enhance processes for mitigating medicine shortages and to strengthen long-term resilience we have identified medicines which are deemed both clinically critical and have potentially vulnerable supply chains. This is not a static list but a process that is used to target the most impactful resilience activities and is regularly updated to take account of the ever-changing supply situation. This information is used to inform which product areas may require additional resilience measures, and to support our work, such as targeted seasonal supply monitoring.