Now drugs are running out.

[Workingman]

And the government does not deny it. What it does says is that:

"The department has recently undertaken a tender exercise to source critical COVID-19 supportive medicines and a second tender exercise is currently live.

"This is a new stockpile and we are currently in the process of awarding contracts and taking and arranging for the delivery of supplies of some of these medicines."

"Tendering for" and the "ordering of" are not the same as holding stocks. The government's own figures show that we currently have zero stockpiles of:

Doxycycline antibiotic, used to treat bacterial side-infections, down from 10,510,440 capsules last year
Fentanyl opioid, down from 818,914 injections last year
Morphine opioid: down from 1,115,656 injections last year
Midazolam anaesthetic/sedative: 504,831 injections last year
Levomepromazine, an antipsychotic drug used for palliative care, down from 84,565 injections last year

Surely somebody must have seen that reserves were being drawn down some time ago and made steps to ensure that they did not get to zero, or is that too much to ask?

We have to hope very hard that current shelf stocks do not run out.

[cromwell]

The NHS is a massive organisation, well quangofied. Someone somewhere must have in their job description that they are responsible for the supply of these drugs.
But you try getting them to admit it!

[Workingman]

Quite! And how many managers are there in the civil service, the DHSC and PHE?

They cannot all be working on "everything" Covid all of the time! How difficult would it be to set up teams to concentrate on this, that and the other and keep their noses out of everything else?

[Suff]

Not That I am condoning anything, but there is a budget. When you blow the budget, in the civil service, you need to precipitate a crisis before you can fix it and get more money.

But you say, this should have been foreseen and the budget adjusted you say. Yes, quite, but everyone was focusing on ppe and nobody anticipated just how many drugs stocks would be ravaged in an attempt to halt the virus and nobody knew what would work or not.

So the budget was set and the drugs that worked were used up. Of course they bought all the other drugs in equal quantity and they are sitting there doing very little.

Hard as it is to understand, or even think that way, NHS budgets are set annually and the real response to this virus has been going on for less than 9 months.

[Workingman]

The budget is no excuse. The emergency funds have always been there, as the new tenders and ordering show. It was also the case with the Nightingales, PPE, and ventilators as well.

The truth is that somebody, somewhere, took their eye off the ball and shouldn't have. It has become a common theme in recent years, in many walks of life, and it needs to be eradicated pretty sharpish.

[cruiser2]

It will never stop when you have as many "managers" as the actual workers and there is no profit and loss account.
Whwn I was working at the last firm we had both internal and external audiors.I had to give a report why I had hired a car. I had had an accident
returning home in the evening when our offices were closed.