Greene appealed to the public to be patient with pharmacy teams who, he said, were “doing their best under what are very difficult circumstances”. <\/p>\n
He said pharmacies may need to ration medicines, for example if a person was prescribed four months of a medicine, this may need to be given to them one month at a time. <\/p>\n
Or, he said, if the medicine was simply not available, they may have to be referred back to their GP for an alternative prescription. <\/p>\n
Greene advised against patients self-selecting alternative medicines or altering doses without professional guidance. <\/p>\n
Danny Donnelly MLA, the chair of the All-Party Group on Community Pharmacy, said the warning was “very concerning”.<\/p>\n
He called on the health minister to recognise “the severity of this issue” and work “with the local community pharmacy sector to reduce the impact and risks to patients”.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the DoH said it was “aware of a current supply issue for co-codamol 30\/500mg tablets, which is affecting all parts of the United Kingdom”, and recognises this is “concerning for patients and the healthcare professionals”.<\/p>\n
“The department is working closely with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the health service here to ensure that patients can continue to access appropriate treatments that meet their needs.<\/p>\n
“It is important that people continue to order medicines in advance and in line with their GP practice policy and do not stockpile medicines, as this can put additional strain on the medicine supply chain,” the statement said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Greene appealed to the public to be patient with pharmacy teams who, he said, were “doing their best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[134,524,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-266763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-health","tag-medication","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}