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Managing stock of critical medicines

Published
Topics: ProcurementTrusts

Essential medicines that must be held in stock or risk assessed for alternatives if unavailable.

This article forms part of a series
  1. Managing medicines inventory
    1. Understanding principles of medicines inventory management
    2. Completing regular and annual stock checks
    3. Reconciling stock in automated storage systems
    4. Monitoring slow moving stock and rarely used medicines
    5. Managing high value medicines
    6. Managing stock of critical medicines
    7. Managing high frequency order lines
    8. Managing expired stock and decommissioned products

Using our advice

Refer to the first article in this series, Managing medicines inventory (SPS page), if you have not done so already.

The actions discussed are viewed as best practice, but none are mandated by SPS regional pharmacy procurement leads.

Critical or operationally essential medicines list

Many pharmacy departments will manage an active list of medicines that are deemed critical to support a defined number of services or procedures. Critical medicines lists will be agreed with senior clinical pharmacy leads and reflect the services supported by the trust. For example, reversal agents, vasopressors and rarely used antibiotics. 

Most pharmacy systems will use average stock issue transactions to determine stock holding. In most cases adjusting the fixed minimum stock holding to levels outside of the parameters for routine ordering to ensure adequate stock is held. 

Monitoring critical medicines

Consider the following actions to monitor your stock of critical medicines.

  • Count stock by location, for example an emergency drug cupboard location.
  • Agree custom list of critical medicines, including stock levels and average use. Critical medicines will need to be monitored as part of a regular process, and top-up orders created where appropriate, some systems might require manual ordering.
  • Engage with lead clinicians as well as chief pharmacist, A&E pharmacist, ITU pharmacist and theatre lead pharmacist to ensure there is an agreed list of medicines that the trust considers critical.
  • Consider adding a flag on the pharmacy IT system to alert pharmacy staff that it is essential to hold an agreed quantity in stock at any time. Consider more frequent stock checks for critical medicines.
  • Review how to best use the “fixed minimum stock levels” feature of your pharmacy IT system. This is particularly useful when wanting to hold defined quantities of critical medicines such as courses of rarely used antibiotics.