HYDERABAD, June 7: Management of the Civil Hospital of Hyderabad (CHH) has purchased a big quantity of substandard Hepatitis screening kits worth around Rs6.6 million from its budget.
However, a separate “Hepatitis Prevention and Control Programme Chief Minister’s Initiative” is already in progress since 2009. The programme has an annual allocation of Rs1 billion.
The kits have been bought without getting any requisition from the CHH pathology laboratory.
CHH medical superintendent Dr Kazim Shah has been informed that kits are substandard and showing no confirmatory results, but he insists that the laboratory should use them and issue receipt against it.
The CM’s Hepatitis-related programme covers all government hospitals, including tertiary hospitals of Nawabshah, Larkana and Sukkur.
CHH is also one of them. According to programme’s provincial head Dr Abdul Majeed Chuttho, right from screening, investigation, vaccination to treatment of patients is free under the programme.
“No tertiary hospital should separately purchase such kits because it can easily divert such money for other welfare-related plans for patients,” he said. Tertiary hospitals have been repeatedly told to avoid duplication of kits unnecessarily to save money.
“When we are providing everything under the programme, there is no need that any tertiary hospital MS should purchase these kits from his funds,” he said.
Sources remain sceptical that these kits are those which might be in excessive in some other hospitals of interior Sindh. After repacking, they are sold in the market in collusion with some health officials who could have possible links with CM’s Hepatitis Prevent and Control Programme.
CHH sources pointed out that hospital’s laboratory submitted requisition for different things to the hospital management and no demand was placed for Hepatitis B and C screening kits. But the CHH management has purchased 400 kits of Hepatitis-B a few months ago. One kit can be used for 96 tests done through Elisa method. “All these 400 kits’ expiry date is March 2013 and by that time laboratory will need only 40 such kits,” said a hospital source. “I don’t know why the MS has purchased such kits even without consulting the laboratory. The cost of these kits is around Rs2.5 million,” he said.
The source said 550 kits purchased for Hepatitis-C which would again expire on March 2013. By that time laboratory would need only 50 to 60 kits. “The cost of these kits is Rs4.1 million,” he said.
He claimed that pathology laboratory staff had brought it to the notice of MS Dr Kazim Shah that kits were ineffective and not showing results. “It indicates that their quality is questionable. It is also learnt that kits have a local coding,” he said. The sources said the hospital laboratory needed six to eight kits every month. When recently around one dozen tests were done on the kits provided by hospitals, they showed negative results. But the kits available in the CM’s programme showed six positive results and 14 negative of the total number of 20 tests.
The CHH management in the first week of June wrote a letter to local distributor (Mr Imran Alam). He forwarded it to the main company which is said to be importing the kits. Alam told Dawn over phone that technical staff of the company had visited hospital and met the MS and pathologist in this regard. He said that the reply had been submitted in response to the letter of CHH.
Reports, however, said that when technical staff of the company talked to pathology staff, they reiterated their assertion that the quality of kits was substandard and they could not be utilised because they were not showing results.
MS Dr Kazim Shah said that “in fact these kits were part of a tender”. He clarified that the management was returning them. He said there was no need of requisition. “We can get them so that if we run short of them, we can adjust,” he said. He maintained that the company had been told to collect the consignment accordingly.