Medicine shortages in hospitals

HEALTH facilities around the country are reporting shortages of medical supplies as the country enters the middle of the election period.
With a report published in this paper on Tuesday regarding drug shortages in Morobe health centres, similar sentiments were shared by health workers from other parts of the country.
New Ireland health authority (PHA)director of curative health services Dr Penny Charles told The National on Tuesday that the province was experiencing shortages of medicines.
“The PHA management has used its own funds to pay for drugs,” he said.
“Drugs bought are only for hospitalised cases.
“Outpatient cases are prescribed medicines and if not available, they are to source from private pharmacies.
“We don’t have many critical drugs at the area medical store in Kokopo and are communicating with other hospitals but they are also in the same situation.
“We have very limited supplies and scaled down our services to emergencies only.
“We can’t operate as normal without adequate medicines for doctors to treat patients and causing stress on our clinicians to see patients frustrated, getting sick and dying from preventable deaths.”
Dr Charles said the challenge was for the Health Department and Treasury to make available funding to purchase medicines.
“Our greatest challenge is the procurement delay with smaller aircraft to Kavieng and unavailability of stocks in country,” he added.
“We have been told the situation may cross over to 2023 and hope we get the needed support during this time to save our people in New Ireland.”