Patients will not have to pay prescription charges when medicine shortages mean they are not given the full amount they were meant to receive.

Health Minister David Ashford moved the regulation in Tynwald last week, as part of measures to deal with any possible shortages of medicines.

The regulations are designed to run alongside any serious shortage protocol that may be introduced. Although medicine shortages may not necessarily be linked to the aftermath of Brexit, the protocols’s possible need may be increased in the months after Britain leaves the EU.

Mr Ashford explained that the new regulations ’provide exemptions to prescription charges so that any patient supplied with a lower quantity of a medicinal product or fewer medicinal appliances than specified on the original prescription form will, in accordance with the serious shortage protocol, be exempted from paying the prescription charge’.

He added: ’A serious shortage protocol allows pharmacists to dispense a different quantity, strength or form of medicinal product or appliance, in accordance with the protocol rather than the prescription.

’Such a protocol may be issued by the department (of Health and Social Care) only in exceptional circumstances if the island is experiencing, or very likely to experience, a serious shortage of a particular product or appliance.’

He acknowledged concern that there was always the possibility that a pharmaceutical company may seek to ’manage demand’ in order to increase prices.

Mr Ashford added that the serious shortage protocols in the island would differ from those in the UK, where it is feared GPs could be circumvented in the process.

’We are not allowing serious shortage protocols to allow for a different medication to be prescribed, it is the form,’ he said.

’Whereas in, for instance, the UK a different form of therapeutic medication could be prescribed under a serious shortage protocol, we have not gone down that line because GPs themselves, quite rightly, had concerns about that and we are wanting to see how that plays out in the UK.’