← European Medicine Shortage Tracker
Everything on this site is derived from official medicines-agency registers — no crowdsourcing, no scraping of unofficial sources, no editorial guesses. This page explains exactly how the data is collected, matched and refreshed, and where it can mislead if read carelessly.
| Scope | Register | Records | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🇩🇪 Germany | BfArM (Germany) | 930 | BfArM logs company-reported Lieferengpässe per product, flags hospital-relevant cases, and usually names an alternative product — one medicine can appear once per strength. |
| 🇫🇷 France | ANSM (France) | 287 | ANSM tracks ruptures de stock and tensions d'approvisionnement for medicines of major therapeutic interest — a curated, clinically-weighted list rather than every pack. |
| 🇦🇹 Austria | BASG (Austria) | 514 | BASG's register records distribution restrictions per product with a 'not available' or 'restricted availability' status; report dates reflect the company's notification. |
| 🇪🇺 EU-wide | EMA shortages catalogue (EU) | 82 | The EMA catalogue lists only shortages assessed at EU level — typically critical, multi-country cases for centrally authorised medicines. National registers list far more. |
| 🇮🇹 Italy | AIFA (Italy) | 2,480 | AIFA's carenze lists are grouped by mitigation: equivalents available, alternative treatment available, or import authorisation possible — the alternatives column reflects that. |
| 🇪🇸 Spain | AEMPS CIMA (Spain) | 921 | AEMPS (CIMA) lists supply problems per national code (pack level) and encodes the mitigation — most entries state whether same-substance equivalents exist. |
| 🇬🇷 Greece | EOF limited-availability list (Greece) | 268 | EOF publishes a periodically-updated list of products in limited availability (περιορισμένη διαθεσιμότητα) with ATC codes, dates and alternative options — richer than most registers, though issued as a document rather than a database, so entries reflect the latest published list. |
| 🇮🇪 Ireland | HPRA (Ireland) | 334 | HPRA reports per-product shortages with an expected return date and whether an authorised alternative exists — one of the few registers publishing prognosis dates for everything. |
| 🇸🇪 Sweden | Läkemedelsverket (Sweden) | 1,137 | Läkemedelsverket logs every reported sales interruption (restnotering) at pack level, so Sweden's raw count runs higher than clinically-focused registers — compare Sweden with itself over time. |
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | NHSBSA Serious Shortage Protocols (UK) | 88 | The UK list covers Serious Shortage Protocols (SSPs) — the shortages severe enough that DHSC formally authorises pharmacy-level substitution — current and historical. The NHS's full internal supply tool is access-controlled, so SSPs are the official public signal. |
Every morning at 06:30 CET — just after the EMA refreshes its bulk files — the pipeline re-pulls each register through its official interface (bulk JSON, public CSV, REST API, or the register's own published pages), normalises every entry into a common schema (product, active substance, status, report date, expected resolution, stated cause, alternatives, source link) and regenerates every page of this site. A register that fails to respond, or returns implausibly fewer records than the previous day, is rolled back to its last good data rather than shrinking the site.
Medicines are grouped across languages by active substance: the same INN spelled as olanzapin (DE/SE), olanzapina (IT/ES) or olanzapine (EN/FR) resolves to one medicine page. Salts, esters and hydrates are stripped before matching, and Spain's product-name substances are validated against the vocabulary of the other registers.
Registers differ in scope, so country totals are not comparable with each other: Sweden logs every pack-level sales interruption, France curates a clinically-weighted list, the EMA catalogue lists only EU-level criticals. Compare a country with itself over time. Statuses and expected-resolution dates are manufacturer-reported estimates filed with the agencies and move frequently; the linked official record is always the authoritative version. A shortage report does not necessarily mean a medicine is unavailable everywhere in that country.
The dataset is free under CC BY 4.0: cite “European Medicine Shortage Tracker (MobiDoctor)” with a link. Bulk downloads live on the data page; every medicine and country page offers a free embeddable widget. Corrections and source suggestions: mobidoctor.eu. This site is informational — it is not medical advice, and nobody should stop or switch a treatment without speaking to a pharmacist or prescriber.