The Drug Shortage: What Critical Care Nurse Readers Report

The February 2012 editorial¹  in Critical Care Nurse (CCN) illuminated the persisting and expanding problem of drug shortages that has been plaguing the US health care system for the past decade. In the editorial I explained that existing shortages primarily affected sterile injectables, including a number of chemotherapeutic agents, an expanding number of analgesics, anesthetics, sedatives, and parenteral nutritional additives such as vitamins and electrolytes. More alarmingly, a number of drugs frequently administered to critical care patients to manage commonly occurring conditions such as dysrhythmias, coagulopathies, and hypotension were reported in scarce supply. After identifying the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists’ current drug shortage list²  in the editorial, I invited readers to share their personal experiences with the drug shortage by completing a brief online survey at the CCN website. This is a report of readers’ replies to that 4-question survey.

A total of 79 readers...