The Quality of Care: Drug Shortages and Patient Outcomes

Drug Shortages and Patient Outcomes
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Drug shortage compromises the quality of care with the delay in the administration of chemotherapy among cancer patients a national concern (Mayer, 2011). There are instances where there is a need to use alternative treatments, but the healthcare practitioners may be unfamiliar with the new regimens while there may also be medical errors. Drug shortage causes delay in interventions while increasing healthcare costs, potentially affecting the patients, healthcare providers, the pharmaceutical industry and the third-party payer (McKeever, Bloch, & Bratic, 2013). At other times, clinicians do not rely on evidence-based practice when there is drugs shortage, while the demand of alternative medications increases and then causing shortage of these drugs.
Work arounds like substitute medications are safe alternatives since discontinuing treatment worsens the outcomes of patient care. In the case of oncology treatments, the production of drugs is expensive and when discontinued it is difficult to access similar drugs. The FDA must approve the oncology medications, some of which have not been released to the public because of violating FDA violations. Evidence-based practice should be respected at all times, since failure to do this affects the quality of care. The quality control risk increases when using alternative medications and care should be exercised when handling such medications. In any case, medications sourced from outside may not have fulfilled all their requirements o...