Following the EU Referendum decision in June 2016, the United Kingdom (UK) officially left the European Union (EU), and its single market and customs union on 31 January 2020. Since the UK now has third country status with regard to dealings with the EU, restricted availability of medicinal products from the UK across EU member states (MS) is expected. Smaller MS, such as Malta, have historically sourced medicinal supplies from the UK. The lack of availability or insufficient supply of medicines represents a significant obstacle to patients’ access to medicines.

Within this article, we investigated how Brexit has affected medicines availability in Malta, namely, to identify which medicines are not available post-Brexit and to recognise experiences of different pharmaceutical sectors involved in the supply chain when it comes to medicine availability post-Brexit. A total of 542 marketing authorisations (MA) with the MA holder based in the UK were withdrawn, and a total of 544 MA became invalidated as MA from the UK since they no longer met EU legislative requirements.

Poor medicines availability has a clear negative downside on econan levels which are especially relevant to MS, such as Malta with smaller pharmaceutical markets, where lack of availability of medicines is a problem. Ultimately, sourcing medicines from other EU MS would allow greater availability of medicines.