Trust

Methodology

Sources

We archive published sources twice daily: DHSC Medicine Supply Notifications as relayed publicly by Community Pharmacy England; the NHSBSA Serious Shortage Protocol register and its protocol documents. NHS dm+d (the Dictionary of Medicines and Devices) product coding is in progress and not yet applied to published records. Every original document is kept verbatim, content-addressed, before any parsing — so our history can always be re-derived and re-checked.

What we publish

Re-expressed facts (which product, which reference, which tier, which dates) and our own derived statistics (durations, extension counts, change feeds). We do not reproduce source editorial or clinical advice — every entry links to the source document instead. Dates the sources state fuzzily (“late August”) stay fuzzy here; we never invent precision.

Coverage & honesty

Coverage is England-first (DHSC notifications as relayed by CPE, plus Serious Shortage Protocols). We now also cover Scotland separately: NHS Scotland issues its own Medicine Supply Alert Notices (MSANs), genuinely Scotland-authored, so they sit on a distinct Scotland page and are never merged into the England register or counts. We deliberately do notadd Northern Ireland as separate coverage: NI's HSCNI/BSO supply alerts re-publish the same DHSC Medicine Supply Notifications (they match England's by title and date), so listing them as NI-specific shortages would double-count one shortage as two nations. Wales is not yet included. UK-wide claims appear only where the source is UK-wide. Source typos — and they exist — are preserved and flagged, not silently corrected. Where our record is incomplete, the gap is shown, not smoothed over. Our archive began in July 2026; Serious Shortage Protocol documents extend back to 2019.

For each Serious Shortage Protocol we also read the signed protocol document for the few facts a pharmacist needs first: which UK nations it covers, its legal category, and the medicine that may be supplied instead. These sit next to a link to the full signed protocol — never our own advice. The substitution is published only when it appears in the source PDF as one contiguous run of text and survives completeness checks; anything we cannot prove word-for-word is withheld rather than paraphrased, because a half-quoted clinical instruction is worse than none. That is a deliberately high bar and it costs coverage: we show the substitution for 23 of 87 protocols. Quantity is not reproduced at all — those cells run to several paragraphs and their boundaries are not reliably derivable, so the protocol itself states them. The per-protocol scope is why UK-wide vs England-and-Wales is now stated from the document itself, not assumed.

A note on counting backwards. Our own capture began in July 2026, and CPE takes a notice down once the shortage resolves — so at first the historical record here was only the notices still on public display, skewed toward longer-running shortages. We have since backfilled the back-catalogue from the Internet Archive: we now hold 277 of about 364 Medicine Supply Notification posts it has ever recorded — roughly three quarters, reaching back to March 2021. Recovered posts are marked as sourced from the Internet Archive, not first-hand capture, and each is dated by its own stated issue date, not when we recovered it.

That figure is lower than the ~83% we published on 23 July 2026. The Internet Archive had captured some posts several times under different tracking query strings (?unlid=…), and we were counting each capture as a separate notice — which also made a handful of medicines look like repeat shortages when they had been notified once. We now count one notice per canonical post URL. The corrected figure is smaller and correct; see the corrections log.

The remaining ~24% are posts the Internet Archive never captured; a handful more are held but not yet machine-readable (older layouts with numeric dates our parser doesn't read yet — flagged, never guessed). So a pre-2021 total is still a floor, and 2021–2026 is now close to complete. Figures we later correct are logged on the corrections page.

Cadence & corrections

Sources are checked at 07:20 and 17:20 UTC; parsed data follows within the hour. Every page shows when sources were last checked and when the data last changed — distinct signals. Corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page when we get something wrong.

Who

Built and operated by Doctor Data Ltd — founded by Dr Mustafa Ghafouri, a medical doctor and former MHRA Lead Data Architect, who also built hospitalwaits.co.uk. ShortageSignal is not an official NHS or DHSC service.