About

Nobody kept the record. We do.

UK medicine shortages are the most severe on record — yet the official notices describing them are scattered across an NHS-login-gated tool, a trade body's rolling news feed, and PDF registers. When a shortage resolves, its notice effectively disappears. That makes the simplest questions unanswerable: how long do shortages like this usually last? How many times has this product gone short? Did the expected date hold?

ShortageSignal exists to answer those questions. We archive every notice as it appears, keep the originals forever, and publish the history as status timelines — with the slipped dates shown as slipped, and every event linked to its source.

It is free to use. It is built by Doctor Data Ltd— founded by Mustafa Ghafouri (MBChB, MSc), a medically qualified data scientist who worked on the MHRA's Regulatory Connect programme from December 2022 to September 2024 — on the same principles as Hospital Waits: open data, named authorship, per-statistic provenance, and no pretence of official status.

Contact: mustafa@doctor-data.co.uk (the same address as the press page). If you spot an error, we want to know — corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page.

Privacy: page views are counted with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies. The only personal data we hold is what people type into an email sign-up (the address, an optional role and what they asked for), used only to send what they asked for once they confirm; email alerts are not yet sending, and every email will carry a one-click unsubscribe. The privacy page sets out exactly what is stored and for how long.