Strategies to Address Antimicrobial Shortages

Milena McLaughlin, PharmD, MSc, Assistant Professor, Pharmacy Practice, Midwestern University and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, explains strategies institutions can take to address antimicrobial shortages.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“[When it comes to the] strategies that institutions can take to address shortages, there’s really a myriad of management strategies. The most important one is to have something that is prospective. You want to know what your inventory is at all times, the drugs on shortages. You want to have a way to monitor what medications are backordered. You want to be looking at the drug shortage websites to know what the medications are, and when they’re expected to come back into stock. If you do have a low inventory of a medication, you may want to put restrictions in place. If there’s a medication for which there’s a clear patient population that’s going to receive the best benefit, you may want to reserve it for that patient population. But the most important part of the management strategy is really communication, making sure that your frontline providers know what’s going on, making sure that all the stakeholders know, and then, of course, when the shortage is resolved, which is a happy time, you want to make sure they know that as well.”