Malakoane launches probe into expired medication saga

The department of health will disclose the amount of money lost in the last financial year due to the problem of expired medication

The MEC for health, Dr. Benny Malakoane, paid an unannounced visit to Bloemfontein’s medical depot, after it emerged that many clinics disperse expired drugs at their pharmacies.

The government medical depot in Bloemfontein supplies medication to clinics and hospitals in the province, and the purpose of the MEC’s visit was to establish the cause and extent of the problem.

The exercise to identify challenges within the health sector and find possible solutions has been going on for some time and, as part of the fact-finding mission, Malakoane has already visited four districts in the province.

“One of the challenges identified during these visits is the poor and aging infrastructure of our clinics. We also want to eliminate long queues and reduce the time people spend waiting for their medication. Another challenge is that we have found out that our clinic have expired medication.

“We want to get to the root cause of this problem and check if we are not provided with medication already close to its sell-by date. We want to get medication that has at least six to eight months before the expiry date. We also want to establish that maybe it’s poor performance from our side or not,” said the department of health’s media liaison officer, Teboho Oepeng.

The department of health will disclose the amount of money lost in the last financial year due to the problem of expired medication.

Meanwhile, the department will be running the “cleanest hospital” competition to incentivise hospitals that adhere to minimum standards for health institutions.

“It will run for nine months. This is our way of saying cleanliness of an institution is the most important requirement in our health facilities. We are not saying this is not happening or we do not trust the report of the good work in our facilities, we just need to check for ourselves that these things are happening,” explained Oepeng.

In another development, police in Bloemfontein have arrested a 58-year-old pharmacist along with his assistant for allegedly selling 42 boxes containing 50 100 ml bottles of codeine cough syrup to two Zimbabwean women, last week.

A 26-year-old driver, also a Zimbabwean national, who was allegedly assisting the two female detainees to transport medicine, was also arrested at his house in Bloemfontein. Police were reacting to information of the pair having purchased a large consignment of medication at a pharmacy in Mangaung.

“The suspects were cornered just outside the city in possession of 42 boxes of medicine valued at about R 30 000. They confirmed, upon questioning, that the medicine was headed for Zimbabwe where they had intended to trade in it,” said the police in a statement.