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Rs. 349mn wasted on poor medical supplies
View(s):- Sri Lanka also wasted Rs. 10.7 billion worth of Pfizer Covid vaccines
Other medicines worth Rs. 32 million were suspended from use for the same reason. Separately, the National Pharmaceuticals Quality Assurance Research Laboratory under the National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) was so poorly equipped that it was not geared to check the quality of drugs before the Health Ministry’s Medicines Supplies Division (MSD) issued them to hospitals.
“As a result, by the time it was reported that the drugs failed, most of the drugs had been used by the patients,” the 2023 NAO Annual Report states.
It also reveals that Sri Lanka wasted Rs. 10.73 billion worth of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines last year, with 56 percent of the shots expiring without use by July 2022.
These included vaccines funded through a World Bank loan under its “COVID-19 Emergency Care and Health System Preparedness Project (Third Supplemental Financing)”.
Between December 2021 and January 2022, the Health Ministry’s Epidemiology Unit received 13,999,050 doses of Pfizer vaccines worth more than Rs. 16 billion. Of these, 7,951,710 doses—or 56 percent—had expired without being administered.
Meanwhile, the Health Ministry has spent Rs. 633 million on the installation of a “Medical Supplies Management Information System” (MSMIS) for the MSD to better organise medical supplies management and to provide a continuous inflow of essential drugs to state hospitals.
The contract was for developing, providing, installing, implementing, training and maintaining the system. The NAO found, however, that the work was stopped midway and a private sector company was granted the contract for Rs. 102 million (in addition to the monies already spent) to set up a new system called “Swastha”.
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