Thread by @nimilamalee

#SriLanka's National Audit Office has found that drugs shortages aren't just caused by the forex crisis. Officials are to blame. Computer systems aren't updated. There's no coordination. And procurement schedules are ignored.
sundaytimes.lk/220626/news/me…

It also found a sharp drop in the financial allocation and expenditure for medical supplies. The Health Ministry’s total net allocation was Rs. 85.9bn in 2020, of which 99 percent went towards medical supplies...

...Last year, the total net allocation was Rs. 151.9bn, of which just 50 percent was for medical supplies. But this is STILL higher than the quarterly average expenditure for medical supplies this year....

... In 2020, the quarterly average expenditure was Rs 20.8bn. It was Rs 18.4bn the following year. In the first quarter of this year, it was a mere Rs. 12.5bn, the NAO states.

The report shows that the Health Ministry, the Medical Supplies Division (MSD), the State Pharmaceutical Corporation of Sri Lanka (SPC) and the State Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Corporation (SPMC) do not work in coordination and this has crippled procurement.

A medical supply management information system (MSMIS) was established in 2015 to cover 82 institutions including the MSD, the SPC, the National Medicine Regulatory Authority and Health Ministry hospitals.

It was extended to base hospitals for ordering, distribution and stock management. It facilitates stock receipts and annual inventory surveys. But the system has neither been updated nor used adequately, the NAO said.

The MSD submits annual order lists to SPC using this MSMIS or ‘PRONTO’ computer systems with a lead time of 11 months. The SPC has delayed procurement until hard copies of these lists were received. It then took 18 days for the SPC's import division to receive the written order.

The computer system allows all the institutions to update progress of a relevant procurement at every step–from ordering to stock delivery. But SPC officials had not input information for the past seven years, citing a technical problem that they had failed to rectify.