CREATESPACE Availability of essential medicines in the Czech Republic: Volume 1

The report provides overview of the situation in the Czech Republic. Essential medicines availability gap represents both public health concern and risk of harm to individual patients. Substitute and second line therapies are often less effective, more toxic, or more expensive. Improvisation and the use of less familiar medicines are more likely to lead to medication errors. Mitigation of shortages and creation of shared contingency supplies puts additional strain on understaffed hospitals, in addition to human toll inflicted by social stress. Drug shortages make it impossible to follow evidence-based practice guidelines, and force decisions to prioritize certain group of people over another. Public health concerns arise due to inability to prevent and treat contagious diseases such as tuberculosis. Significant resources have to be dedicated to overseeing and managing the situation at government and supranational level. Of the 427 essential medicines, 311 are registered. Of these, 292 essential medicines showed active marketing in Q3 2016 and 19 were registered but not marketed. 116 (27%) were not registered, and therefore not available, rather than in shortage locally. Availability gap amounts to 135 (32%) essential medicines for both unregistered and not marketed essential medicines.