'You think, where's the next drug coming from?'

A pharmacist says he is having to tell patients on a daily basis that he cannot provide the medicines they need.

Sie Ting, from Hessle Pharmacy, East Yorkshire, said he was seeing shortages of heart, blood pressure and cholesterol drugs and staff were spending hours trying to source substitutes.

Meanwhile, patient Jane Meredith, 67, said she had spent an entire morning calling pharmacists within 50 miles of her Bridlington home to find medication for a thyroid condition, adding: "You start to think where's the next drug coming from?"

The Department of Health and Social Care has been contacted for comment.

Talking about the scale of the problem, Ting said: "It's on a daily basis. We have that conversation more than 10 times in a day.

"Things like aspirin, which is to thin the blood – it's a bit daft when things like this are going out of stock."

While many patients were understanding, "people can get quite upset and angry".

Ting said staff were working hard to find other options for patients.

"It would be nice if we can just get a prescription, dispense and hand it out.

"But a lot of the time the staff members here are spending a lot of time ringing the surgery, ringing the patients, just to try to source the medication.

"Most of the time we can get them sorted, but it's very time consuming."

Meredith has a condition called subclinical hypothyroidism

"It causes quite a lot of symptoms – weight gain, overwhelming tiredness, skin conditions," she explained.

"The most worrying is it raises your cholesterol so it can affect your heart."

On Monday, Meredith said she only had nine tablets of her medication, Levothyroxine, and trying to find more was making her anxious.

"It's very frustrating, it's quite stressful, it's very time-consuming.

"I spent an entire morning ringing all these chemists within a 50-mile radius and the result was I only managed to find two split packs."

Medications for ADHD, cancer treatments, statins, opioid painkillers, anaesthetics and antibiotics have had persistent or recurring shortages globally in recent years.

In the UK, there are 124 drugs in short supply, down from 142 in February 2025, according to a tracker published by MIMS, an industry reference guide.

• Why so many people are struggling to get medicine

In January this year, the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) said 86% of the pharmacies it surveyed had been unable to supply aspirin to patients.

The body called on the government to speed up plans to scrap a law that prevents pharmacists from making substitutions to prescriptions when met with low stock.

At the time, a DHSC spokesperson said the government was "strengthening our domestic resilience" by investing "up to £520m to manufacture more medicines, diagnostics, and medical technologies in the UK".

It was also working to "cut red tape" to grow the life sciences sector and "bolster supply chains".

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