Medicines shortage in medical scientific journals: A literature review

Abstract

The shortage of medicines is already considered a public health problem that affects several regions worlwide and is a major obstacle to ensure access to medicines and, consequently, the right to health. Thus, in order to better understand this phenomenon, this article sought to identify, describe and characterize the medical scientific publications that deal with the issue of medicines shortages and to identify the gaps on this theme. For that, a narrative review of the medical scientific literature was carried out in the PubMed database. The results were selected according to the title and abstract, and the data were extracted from the full text. In addition to quantitative analysis, a qualitative synthesis of the studies was also performed, identifying the mentioned causes, coping strategies, conceptual discussions and problem description. We analyzed 98 papers, most of them published since the year 2011, in the United States, citing various drugs and with a focus on describing the problem. The results of this study suggest the contemporaneous of the problem, the use of scientific literature as drug shortages denunciation, the lack of studies in low-and middle-income settings, and a gap in studies that investigates the causes of medicines shortages.