Ms Anne Marie Seymour:

Ideally, one can react better, the more notice one has. Sometimes, if a notification comes quite slowly, or if medicine will be in short supply within a short period of time, it does not give us the same powers to be able to react in a better way because we would work with the HSE, with the medicines authority, with the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland and the Medical Council, with regard to clinical guidance and how to manage a shortage. There have been cases where if we had known earlier, and if the Health Products Regulatory Authority had been informed earlier that there was a shortage coming, then things could have been done in a better way. Clinical guidance just talks about something one cannot do overnight.