Drug shortage due to poor planning and lack of staff

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The National, Wednesday 09th November 2011

By SHIRLYN BELDEN
POOR forecasting and lack of health workers are among problems causing the chronic shortages of medicine in the country, a conference has been told.
A report by World Health Organisation technical officer Jhin Kim said the lack of medicines could be due to the lack of knowledge of the cost of the specific medicines needed, how much was needed and the rational use of the medicines.
The report was presented at the Pharmaceutical Society of Papua New Guinea’s second biennial conference in Port Moresby on Monday.
The report said the challenges would remain if proper measures were not taken seriously by the government.
The challenges identified are in the areas of procuring medicines, warehousing or storage, distributing and accessibility.
The report said there was a lack of forecast in the planning and buying of specific drugs and medicines for the different hospitals, health centres and aid posts in urban and rural areas.  
That had caused the wrong purchases of drugs and the buying of poor quality drugs.
“The area medical stores are unfit for storage, thus causing delays in distributing to and accessing of medicines in health centres across the country,” the report said.
Health supplies are delivered to health centres and aid posts every two months and to provincial hospitals every month.
Kim said unfortunately this had not been the practice for some time now. 
“The work done in almost all health centres, hospitals and aid posts are mainly presumptions; there is no record of anything and everything is an ad-hoc job. This has caused delays or no drugs delivered to specific centres,” she said.
She said work was under way to use geo-mapping to locate aid posts and health centres in rural provinces inaccessible by plane or roads. 
“Locating of the aid posts will keep track of how much is needed and the supplying of medicines to the population there,” she said.