Nine leading European university hospitals are warning they will run out of essential medicines needed for COVID-19 patients in intensive care in less than two weeks as they are increasingly crushed by the pandemic.
The European University Hospital Alliance said that without countries cooperating to ensure a steady supply of these drugs, doctors and nurses might no longer be able to provide adequate intensive care for people critically ill with the new coronavirus.
In a statement published this week and sent to national governments, the group said that aside from the need for protective gear and ventilators, “the most urgent need now is for the drugs that are necessary for intensive care patients.” They wrote that existing stocks of muscle relaxants, sedatives and painkillers were likely to run out in two days at the hardest-hit hospitals, and in two weeks at others.
Last week, Italy’s national pharmaceutical agency issued a formal alarm to regional health authorities that the recent jump in demand for some medicines had depleted supplies. The agency set up a special email address for the regional authorities to report any difficulties finding certain drugs.
The shortage of such critical medicines has led some hospitals to buy alternative drugs or to try giving patients different dosages.
“It is extremely worrying that overworked and often less-experienced nurses and doctors-in-training, drafted to fill the gaps, have to use products and dosages that they are not used to,” the group wrote, on behalf of hospitals in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Spain.
A team of experts for the hospitals authority in Paris last week drew up a list of suggested workarounds for emergency units to employ to try to ward off what it identified as a “strong risk” of some sedatives and painkillers running out. The experts said that for each prescription, medics should ask themselves whether a drug is really necessary and if doses can be reduced, as well as consider alternative drugs.