This post is a part of a series on drug shortages.
In my last post I discussed the issue I’d found with ATC codes in the DSC database being truncated/incorrect. This meant that when I had done the essential medicines analysis my results would have been underestimates since many of the shortages would not have matched the full ATC codes in the essential medicines list I was using.
To fix this, I fetched an extract of the Health Canada Drug Product Database and used it to look up the ATC codes for each shortage by way of the Drug Identification Number.
And? Big difference in results.
There were 106 shortages of essential medicines in 2019, and essential medicines account for 24.3% of all of the shortages in the same time period.
I’ve updated the results on the dashboard if you want more details:
