Health minister warns against artificial medicine shortages

Georgia’s Health Minister, Mikheil Sarjveladze, has warned against the artificial creation of medicine shortages, saying such practices must not be used to stimulate sales of alternative products within the same drug category.

He stressed the importance of ensuring that shortages did not emerge deliberately, particularly when aimed at shifting demand toward medicines not subject to price regulation.

“It is important to clearly understand that shortages must not be created,” Sarjveladze said. “There should be no artificial shortage of a particular medicine within the same category in order to encourage the sale of another product.”

The minister said he hoped that businesses operating in the pharmaceutical sector would not act in ways that harm citizens, adding that such behaviour would be unacceptable.

Sarjveladze noted that the state had mechanisms to protect consumers from price increases and artificially induced shortages. He added that if companies attempted to shift demand to medicines not covered by reference pricing, the government had the authority to extend reference prices to those products as well.

“Unfortunately, there have been instances of bad practice,” he said, referring to cases where shortages of one medicine were created to promote the sale of another. “There are tools to combat this, and Georgia has real potential to further develop regulation in this area.”

Among the measures under consideration, Sarjveladze highlighted the possibility of defining a list of essential medicines - drugs that must be available in pharmacies - which could become a mandatory requirement aimed at preventing artificial shortages.

He also referred to incidents following the reduction in prices of psychotropic medicines, a reform launched last year that, he said, produced rapid and significant results. 

The official also noted there were attempts in some cases to claim that medicines were unavailable, despite stocks being present and subject to effective monitoring.

“There were incidents where patients were told that a specific medicine was out of stock, but inspections later showed it was available,” Sarjveladze said. In one case, he added, government representatives visited a pharmacy around an hour after a complaint and found that the medicine in question was being stored on site.

The minister said such practices remain limited in scale and were being addressed through regulation and oversight.