KARACHI, May 30: All government-run hospitals of the city have had a shortage of medicines for 11 months past. However, for the last month of the current budget year, they will have a surplus, it is learnt.
The reason: the system for purchase and supply of medicines is inefficient. Under this system, only 25 per cent of the funds meant for medicines are at the disposal of the hospitals. The remaining 75 per cent are handled by a separate team which is responsible for purchasing medicines and then distributing the same among the healthcare units.
This system was devised to do away with corruption which had seeped into the old arrangement in which the hospitals directly controlled purchase of medicines. However, the system which replaced the old plan of things has also failed to deliver the goods, agree some government officials.
On condition of anonymity, they told Dawn on Friday that the new system was not efficient either because there was corruption in the purchase of medicines or because the officials running the operations were incompetent.
A senior official told Dawn that holding back the supply of medicines in the first 10 months of a budget year was routine. “The aim of this exercise is to set aside two months in which to let loose all kinds of objectionable practices,” he said.
“With just one month remaining before the relapse of the unutilized budget, the officials responsible for purchasing get away with all kinds of objectionable deals amid a clamour for medicines, any type of medicine, from the hospitals.”
He said this was exactly what happened this year. “Who has got the time to scrutinize every deal, every transaction, especially when there is a great shortage in every hospital.”
Another official said that one reason for the irregular supply of medicines was lack of smooth financing. “With most of the money going to the development side, the purchase department is cash-strapped most of the time. If and when the purchasing people get the money, the supply gets better.”
Inquiries made by Dawn on Friday, however, revealed that this time round, the procurement staff were not short of funds. The adviser to the chief minister on health, Noman Saigal, told this reporter on Friday that the I. I. Depot had a big stock of medicines.
He said it took an urgent order from him to force open the supply of medicines from the depot. “Within the next couple of days all the hospitals will get the medicines they need.”
The Civil Hospital Karachi and Jinnah Post-graduate Medical Centre, to which only about 50 per cent of the total medicines allowed this year has been supplied, will get the remaining 50 per cent in the next 30 days or so.
This shows conclusively that the medicine supply system needs to be overhauled, most of the officials with whom Dawn discussed the issue said.
A related issue was the non-prescription by some doctors of the drugs that regularly figured on the list of medicines to be supplied by the health department, a physician defending the performance of state-owned hospitals told Dawn.
He said almost all the commonly-prescribed drugs were on this list. “However, if you go to the government stores with a prescription having the names of some drugs which are not on the approved list, you are most likely to return disappointed.”
The issue was an important one because each time a store refused to issue a medicine demanded, an impression was unnecessarily created that there was a shortage, said the doctor.
He said powerful drug companies provided all kinds of incentives to surgeons and physicians who in turn prescribed their “favourite medicines”, regardless of whether they were on the list.
