Medicines security—a national priority (4 February 2026)

Summary

This report from the House of Lords Public Services Committee finds that medicine supply shortages are not prioritised as the potential national security issue that they represent given the significant risk to people’s health when they cannot access necessary medication. In addition, the UK government and the NHS are key to ensuring patients get the medicines they need, but there is a lack of oversight and coordination over medicine resilience.

Content

Reports of medicines shortages are rising. Without access to the right medication, patients may experience worsening health outcomes, stress, and anxiety over their health, and they may fall out of work. In the worst cases, medicines shortages have led to patient deaths.

In 2025, 73% of pharmacy team members stated medicine supply issues were putting patient health at risk. Yet despite the significant impact medicines shortages can have, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) were unable to tell us if the number of shortages was rising or falling.

Shortages can vary in length and cause–there may be brief interruptions to supply which are swiftly rectified, longer term supply chain disruptions caused by global issues, or complete severance of supply where a medicine is no longer available to the UK.

This report sets out the need for clear, proactive leadership from the UK Government to strengthen medicines supply and resilience of supply chains. This leadership needs three strands. 

• Firstly, the DHSC need to better support pharmacies and hospitals to manage shortages. Connectivity presents a key issue here. Currently, community pharmacies and hospitals may only discover a medicine shortage is occurring when they are unable to order medicines for patients, and shortages create extra pressure and work for clinicians trying to support patients, both through sourcing medicines and providing alternatives. The Government needs to improve how it shares information with care providers about shortages and availability of medicine throughout the supply chain, and ensure GPs, hospitals and community pharmacies have the tools they need to access medicines and support patients during shortages.
• Secondly, the Government needs to better work with the pharmaceutical industry to identify and prevent shortages, through boosting medicines manufacturing and supply chain resilience both globally and once medicines have arrived on UK shores. The Government should clearly signal the importance of stable supply chains to the industry through resilience-focused procurement and contract management. As part of this, the Government should identify and share which medicines they believe are critical for the UK through publishing a Critical Medicines List. The Government should then set out how it plans to boost resilience for medicines on that list.
• Thirdly, the importance of medicine supply must also be emphasised within government. The impact of medicines shortages goes far beyond the health system, and this should be recognised through more effective cross-government work and putting medicine supply shortages on the National Risk Register. Crucially, this cross-government work must include foreign and trade policy. Problems in medicine supply are not unique to the UK, and governments across the world are taking steps to boost their own medicines resilience. The UK needs to work with international partners to develop a diverse range of medicine resilience measures to make sure the UK is not left behind as other countries shore up their medicine supply.

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