Medicine Shortages: From Assumption to Evidence to Action - A Proposal for Using the FMD Data Repositories for Shortages Monitoring.

Medicine shortages may negatively impact patient care and the patient experience. Shortages should be a priority of industry, supply chain stakeholders and national competent authorities, and deserve more than empathy or "lip-service" but serious engagement and action. Under the overarching principle that without correct measurements in place there cannot be any improvement in overall performance (1), stakeholders in the pharmaceutical supply chain, notably pharmaceutical manufacturers have made the call for all relevant sources of information to be used in order to provide additional intelligence about the root causes and drivers of shortages, including the identification of bottlenecks in the supply chain.

Patients with cluster a personality disorders in psychotherapy: an effectiveness study.

Background: While psychopharmacological studies are common in patients with cluster A personality disorders, the effects of psychotherapy have received little attention. The aim of this study is to explore whether psychotherapeutic treatment yields health gains for these patients.

Methods: The study was conducted between March 2003 and June 2008 in 6 mental health care centres in the Netherlands, with a sample of 57 patients with a DSM-IV-TR axis II cluster A diagnosis.