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Medicine shortages are not just a problem in the UK. Gareth Jones, public affairs manager at the NPA, considers the international dimension

You will have noticed that national news bulletins are currently dominated by international stories. The football World Cup, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Somalia, EU reform, the list goes on ... Whatever the geography, the events seem close to home and are having a tangible impact here in the UK.

When we think about community pharmacy, we rightly think first about local communities, patients and staff. However, there is inevitably an international dimension to the operations of the sector. Take, for example, the continuing, frustrating and hugely time-consuming problem of medicine shortages.

This is not a problem that can be resolved entirely by interventions within these shores. Medicine shortages affect countries all over the world. Even the Unites States, by far the most valuable pharmaceutical market in the world, is not immune. Our colleagues in Europe are all affected. The causes are complex and many €“ from quotas introduced to reduce the incidence of parallel trading, to the consolidation of manufacturing in a small number of production units and the reliance on long supply chains with more products manufactured on the other side of the world. The common theme here is that most of the decisions taken or events that occur to create shortages happen outside the UK, and so we must look outside our borders for a solution.

So the NPA has called on the Pharmaceutical Group of the European Union (which we sit on alongside the RPS and PSNI) to prioritise this problem. The PGEU is taking up the fight and in the first instance has brought together, for the first time, a group of representative bodies from across the supply chain at EU level. The manufacturers, wholesalers, parallel traders and pharmacists are all sitting around the table. There is agreement that the current situation cannot continue, although a common position on the solution is understandably more difficult to find. We will also be pushing the European Union to recognise that its own legal framework is fundamentally flawed, as it does not deliver the assurance of continuous supply that it promises. We also support the international pharmacy organisation FIP in its efforts to draw governments' attention to this problem.

None of this means that we can overlook the impact of decisions taken domestically, which, of course, have the most direct and immediate bearing on the experience of pharmacists and staff. The NPA will continue to use all the avenues open to it to at home and abroad to push for improvements in the medicines supply chain. We will continue to lobby government, parliamentarians and other supply chain players. Meanwhile, the NPA has published a medicines supply chain toolkit to equip NPA members to confront medicine supply problems affecting their pharmacy.