Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony is blaming a shortage of medicines in the public health care system on the previous administration.

But he is assuring the public that the Government is doing all that it can to replace thousands of medications that are in short supply at hospitals and health institutions across the country.

At an afternoon press conference, the Health Minister announced that in the past few months, his Ministry has been forced to dump more than $10 billion worth of expired drugs that were sitting on shelves in the government bonds.

He said it is clear that there were more drugs bought than were needed and in other cases, the supply chain was not adequately served to reach the outlying regions. In total, the Minister of Health said over 300 truckloads of expired medications were dumped and the Ministry has been making moves to replenish the supply.

“When we go back and look at our records, we have found that from 2015 to now, there has been close to 10 billion worth of medicines that had to be thrown away and this is quite a significant sum of money”, he said.

The Ministry has caused an audit of the entire situation to take place. The Health Minister said it is a crisis that was inherited and steps are now being taken to ensure the situation does not repeat itself. Those steps include repairs to the electronic system that is in place to make requests for drugs and supply the drugs to the hospitals.

“We have now been able to restore the electronic medical system that we have at the MMU and so we have updated that so that all the records going forward, we are able to use that now to make timely decisions and we have appointed in every region, someone who is responsible for pharmaceutical supplies so that they can check and constantly know the stock…so they don’t have to wait until there is a shortage”, Anthony said.

The Minister said in recent months the supply of anti-retroviral drugs for HIV patients and drugs for patients undergoing dialysis treatment were affected. He said in the case of the dialysis, there was a break in the supply chain that affected the safety of the medication, forcing the authorities to discard that supply. Anti-retroviral drugs for HIV patients are currently being sought to ensure that the supply is adequate moving forward.

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