MEDICINES being delivered at National Pharmaceutical Company (NatPharm) Harare Branch will be distributed straight to the hospitals and clinics which desperately need them, Health and Child Care Minister Obadiah said on Thursday.
By Kudakwashe Pembere
He said this during a tour of NatPharm Harare Warehouse by members of parliamant where some drugs purchased from the RTGS$80 million secured by government were delivered by trucks.
“All the stock that you being delivered today at NatPharm Harare is not going to stay at Natpharm Harare. We have given an instruction that all the products be moved out of these warehouses to the institutions with immediate effect.
“So as you can see the lorries keep coming delivering and as they come and deliver the items are recorded. After recording, out to the institutions,” Dr Moyo said.
Yesterday giving his oral submissions to the legislators on the state of drug supplies in the country, the Minister also noted there will be a transparent adjudication process involving hospital officials.
“We have also utilized the end users. The end users at the institutions must be the ones to come and do the adjudication of all the products.
“Not just NatPharm only on their own it’s the end users. We want to be utilizing the product and therefore they must be the ones who are available to utilize and be able to select what they want to use,” Dr Moyo said.
This was the case at NatPharm Harare Warehouses as Harare Central Hospital officials were there to see if the medicines they ordered were available.
NatPharm received RTGS$25 million as part of the RTGS$80 million. The Minister explained with concern how the situation in the country’s hospital is where there are no medicines from district to tertiary hospitals. The Minister is hopeful with their new strategy of utilizing the tender process will help in alleviating the crisis in hospitals.
“We said let’s have a go. Let’s go to tender and request for companies to submit in RTGS$. To our surprise it worked. We got a very good response. As we sit here now there are deliveries taking places. And we are now able to utilize our health levy fund which we couldn’t before because of no foreign currency.
“Now because of the introduction of that interbank rate at 2, 5 this has helped us to go to tender and request for quotations in RTGS$. So it has worked. And we have managed to secure RTGS$80 million worth of medicines which are going to NatPharm.
“And let me tell you what we have said, we have said our stores at the hospital pharmacies are empty. They are empty.
“We have a long task. A huge task to fulfil. We have started writing to the hospital storerooms for medicines and then we are starting at district level, we go to the provincial level, we go into the tertiary institutions. They are all empty. This is the situation. So we have a huge gap to fill,” said the Minister.
He also said they have engaged the police to ensure that there will be no pilferage of medicines.
