Drug shortages in Pharmacy practice and the Ethics of Social consequences as an ethical framework for resource allocation
Abstract
Drug shortages impact health systems worldwide and hamper pharmacists' efforts to provide optimal pharmaceutical services to their patients. Pharmacists encounter significant levels of moral stress to find optimal alternatives.
Several ethical issues arise from drug shortages such as allocation of scarce drugs. Evidence-based decisions combined with ethical and professional judgements should be utilised by pharmacists to make allocation decisions.
Ethics of Social Consequences (ESC) can provide pharmacists with a suitable ethical framework to deal effectively with such moral issues and make decisions aligned with the values of humanity, human dignity and justice that will result in positive social consequences. Further, moral dilemmas of the pharmacy profession often have different socio-economic, demographic, geographic and medical factors and should be examined individually.
This feature is compatible with the case-oriented approach of ESC which is an optimal way of dealing with moral issues of the pharmacy profession and provide flexible, fruitful solutions.