Medicines stockout crisis in North West
Stockouts have been a crisis in South Africa for years and the government hasn’t been able to find a permanent solution. The North West Health Department, which was put under administration, has been hit by strikes after the department failed to pay suppliers, causing employees to strike and putting patients lives at risk.
A report in 2013 by Stop Stockouts outlined the crisis in South Africa. According to the report, one in five health facilities in South Africa are affected by stockouts, with over 400 facilities reporting a shortage of ARVs and/or TB medicines, 4% of those facilities coming from North West – the least across all provinces.
With over 300 health facilities across the province, it is expected that HIV and TB patients will be the hardest hit.
Collapsed
The collapsed delivery of chronic medication poses a danger to the management of treatment of chronically ill patients in the province and could result in loss of lives. It’s still unclear when the strike will end and which regions will be mostly affected. But all provincial health facilities are on high alert.
Stop Stockouts, an NGO that monitors medicines shortages, says it has been informed that antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), particularly second-line ARVs which are critical, are running low in the province.
The organisation’s project manager Glenda Muzenda says they’ve also noticed a spike in the number of stockouts reported via their hotline since the industrial action.
The collapsed delivery of chronic medication poses a danger to the management of treatment of chronically ill patients in the province and could result in loss of lives.
“Patients have indicated an increasing problem across the province, and many are being turned away from clinics which have run out of medication or have been given lesser quantities. We have received over 50 reports of stockouts which is really concerning because no patient should be sent away without medicines,” said Muzenda.
In the meanwhile, Muzenda told Health-e News that the National Department of health has assured them that this will be rectified urgently.
“We are urging both the National and Provincial Departments of Health to act swiftly to resolve the strike, as it is now compromising the lives of people who depend on public health services in the North West,” says Muzenda.
An edited version of this story was published by Health24.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Medicines stockout crisis in North West
by Graeme, Health-e News
April 19, 2018
Related
Hawkers booted out of local school
For years, schools in Ikageng have allowed hawkers to sell food to learners inside school premises, but one primary school has decided to bar them.
#NHIPublichearings: ‘The NHI will save the North West from the corrupt department of health.’
Like other public hearings, residents want their facilities to be fixed before the implementation of the NHI Bill.
Pleasure, politics and the punani: You don’t need a tight vagina to enjoy sex
In a society that believes tight vaginas increase sexual pleasure, especially for men, uncertified products and home remedies are gaining popularity amongst women online and in real life.