Pharmacist explains medical stores’ function in province

EAST New Britain (ENB) pharmacist Leo Kume says the province has two medical store, the ENB medical store and area medical store (AMS).
AMS was for the New Guinea Islands (NGI) which catered for ENB, West New Britain (WNB) New Ireland and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville while the provincial medical store catered only for ENB.
Kume said the four provinces’ medical supplies came from the New Guinea Islands’ regional AMS centre in Kokopo.
He explained that the function of the provincial medical store was to transit medical supplies to all the health facilities in the province.
“We transit vaccines, health kits and also we are doing small orders for our aid posts which we order from the AMS and we supply our aid posts,” he said. Kume said all the health centres in ENB placed their orders for medical supplies to AMS every two months while the two hospitals, Nonga and St Mary’s Vunapope, placed their orders every month.
Kume said ENB medical store was under the public health division which came under the ENB provincial health authority’s board.
“Our role at the provincial medical store is to collect orders from health centres and we send the orders to the AMS,” he said.