“I had patients coming in this morning buying bottles of Calpol because they heard it is running short, and this has a knock-on effect, because you will have people coming in with prescriptions with a really sick child and they really need Calpol.”
When she gets a prescription for an antibiotic for a sick child, she invariably has to contact the GP asking them to prescribe an alternative. “And the patient is standing there waiting, and naturally they are getting annoyed, because they have a sick child in the car. And there is nothing you can do to speed up the process because the doctor is just as busy down in the surgery, so you might not hear back for hours. It is incredibly frustrating,” she says.
Pharmacists around the country are dealing with shortages of everything from cough syrups to antibiotics to throat sprays but, according to Ms O’Connor, there is also a problem sourcing some antidepressants that patients may have been on for years. Paracetamol rationing is also a reality. “If someone is prescribed 200, I would say: ‘I will give you 100 today, and will you come back in when you need the remainder of it?’”
Mr Tully says that if they had done this during the summer, when HRT became difficult to source, the process would have been embedded by now. Like his colleagues, Shane Currid, a pharmacist based in Ballymote in Co Sligo, says he spends hours every day trawling through suppliers’ websites trying to source medications.
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