THATTA: Over 160 government heal­th­­care facilities in the province have been facing hiccups in getting drugs for about three months and oftentimes they have to grapple with shortage of particular medicines, which are provided to patients free of cost, Dawn learnt on Friday.

Official sources said that the government had outsourced the drugs’ purchase for the hospitals to a private entity under Public Private Partnership Act 2010 since 2017 but “procedural issues” were creating a major hurdle to smooth procurement and provision of medicines to hospitals.

Despite repeated reminders, transfer of funds for the purchase of drugs hit delays and affected routine healthcare service at the hospitals, said the sources.

The sources said that provision of most medicines had fallen short of the sanctioned volume since August this year whereas majority of government healthcare facilities were permanently running short of medicines for a couple of months.

Officials disclosed on condition of anonymity that the procured consignment of medicines had started arriving at warehouses but it would not be provided to hospitals till the provincial drug inspectors okayed it and the inspectors had taken samples of some medicines for quality analysis at Sindh drug testing laboratory.

Under the rules the drug provider would have to wait till the analysis reports came and then distribute medicines to hospitals or return them to suppliers in case of quality issues, said the sources.

Regional programme manager of Medical Emergency Resilience Foundation — the private partner of Sindh government in health sector for Thatta and Sujawal — Adam Malik disclosed that Merf procured medicines under a warranty invoice from reputed manufacturers pre-qualified by the government under a central contract list.

“We ourselves provide inform­ation to authorities concerned including the drug inspector about manufacturers and suppliers as required under section 21 of the Drugs Act 1976,” he said.

Analysis reports of some drugs which were sampled in March 2019 were still being awaited.

In March 2018 provincial and federal authorities jointly sampled the medicines provided by UN agencies, WHO and Unicef for pneumonia and diarrhoea among children and the drugs expired after a year but their approval was still awaited, said the sources.

Thirteen hospitals, including two district headquarter hospitals, three taluka hospitals and eight rural health centres have been entrusted to Merf in Thatta and Sujawal and almost all health facilities face unavailability of medicines resulting in serious prob­lems to poor patients who frequented the government health facilities.

Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2019