A number of women have reported problems with the oestrogen patches not adhering or working properly. Photo: Garo Phanie / AFP
The Ministry of Health is confident the manufacturer of Estradot patches is taking complaints seriously.
A number of women have reported problems with the oestrogen patches not adhering or working properly, which has caused some of their perimenopause symptoms to return.
Manufacturer Sandoz told RNZ it had received about 50 complaints from New Zealand, and Medsafe has received 149 complaints.
Ministry of Health clinical chief advisor Anna Skinner explained that the complaints were spread across multiple batches, which indicated that a manufacturing issue was not to blame.
"The manufacturers have levels within batches that they will look out for, and while there's been significant complaints there has been no complaints about one specific batch that have reached that level," she told Morning Report.
"They're certainly keeping a very close eye, they have re-tested the batches that have been affected because of the concerns. Sandoz have taken it very seriously."
She said complaints about medications were common and could usually be traced back to individual factors beyond the manufacturer's control.
"We would expect that sometimes there could be complaints, and they watch for a threshold because sometimes there can be individual things that have set that off," she said.
"It may have been about storage in a particular place or something like that, we don't see any evidence of that for these batches but those are the sorts of things we're trying to figure out."
Skinner still encouraged women experiencing issues to report them or file a complaint.
"I think it still is [worth registering a complaint], obviously we haven't reached the thresholds but if there's people out there that have not considered they had a problem and are reflecting on it, we would like to hear about that," she said.
"And we'd definitely like people suffering from a recurrence of their menopause symptoms to seek medical advice, because that's pretty unpleasant and a bit frightening for people."
She said the Ministry of Health and Medsafe were always on the lookout for issues with medications.
"We always want to hear, and occasionally there have been other medications where there has been a change and it has caused issues for people so it is really important that we hear about that so we can check in and see if something is happening."
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