NMS advised to improve medical supplies

Apr 11, 2011

THE National Medical Stores (NMS) should develop a comprehensive quality assurance system so that medical supplies are monitored until they are distributed, recalled by the manufacturer or destroyed once expired, procurement experts have advised.

By Mary Karugaba

THE National Medical Stores (NMS) should develop a comprehensive quality assurance system so that medical supplies are monitored until they are distributed, recalled by the manufacturer or destroyed once expired, procurement experts have advised.

Senior procurement consultants from Procurement Initiative Africa; Jorge Lynch, J. Vedamurthy and Andrew Muhimbise made the remarks in a report to NMS and the Auditor General (AG).

They attributed the expiry of drugs at the medical stores to poor logistics management, administration and coordination of various activities within the logistics chain.

Rather than fragment the logistics function as is presently the case, NMS should merge the procurement, stores and operations under a logistics management section, the report said.

The report followed a story run in New Vision last year that unveiled the rot in the medical stores. The story followed the AG’s value for money report on the medical stores, which indicated that whereas NMS could not supply enough malaria drugs to Ugandans, it spent billions of shillings importing huge quantities of less needed drugs, which ended up expiring.

In his report, the AG, John Muwanga, disclosed that drugs worth sh6b expired between July 2005 and June 2008.

“NMS stocked ranitidine, an ulcers drug, to last 27 years. Since drugs have a shelf life of two to four years, most of the ranitidine will expire before it is used. A monthly storage cost of sh36m was wasted on expired drugs and their subsequent destruction cost about sh700m.”

Handing over the report to Muwanga on Friday, Muhimbise said NMS should re-think its organisational structure as the first step in finding a solution to poor management of its medical supplies.

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