Drugs and Dues
The news about Sir Salimullah Medical College & Mitford Hospital running without any essential drugs, including life-saving ones, for the last two months once again reveals the disheartening status of the country's health- and medi-care services system. Lack of supply of about two hundred such medicines for more than eight weeks sends dreary signals to patients who depend on this hospital located in the old part of Dhaka city. And that patients undergoing surgery are left on their own to buy drugs which are vital from stores outside the hospital premises is another dreadful worry. This proves inefficiency of the medical administration in the country.
The absence of essential drugs reportedly originates from financial mismanagement of the hospital authority, the health directorate of the government and Essential Drug Company Limited (EDCL), the firm that provides pharmaceutical products to the government-run hospitals. On the one hand, EDCL has held up their supply to Mitford Hospital which owed quite a large amount of money to the former; and on the other, cash sanctioned for this hospital by the financial wing of the health directorate is not sufficient to resume this supply immediately. The apparent lack of co-ordination and financing among these authorities are affecting the patients.
This asymmetrical anomaly must not be allowed to continue. The health directorate should evaluate whether there is a need to raise budget allocations for the hospitals, the hospital concerned should be more cautious about handling drugs so that these don't find way illegally into the stores outside the hospital, and EDCL is expected to be more flexible about supplying medicine so that no patient aches in absence of a 'pathedrine'.
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