Hospitals are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars importing older antibiotics because drug manufacturers won’t bear the cost of getting them registered with the TGA, researchers say.

Doctors who want to import and prescribe unregistered drugs must apply to the TGA under its Special Access Scheme, which the medicine watchdog says is only meant for “exceptional clinical circumstances”

The scheme is usually associated with experimental treatments, with patients approved on a case-by-case basis in a time-consuming bureaucratic process.

But it is increasingly being used to obtain clinically necessary antibiotics, according to researchers from the University of Adelaide.