Drug distributor describes drug wastage as a disaster

DRUG Distributor Paul Gibson says wastage of drugs in the National Drug Formulary is a problem which needs to be addressed.

His comments came during a press briefing hosted by the Ministry of Health with stakeholders in the pharmaceutical sector at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre yesterday.

Commending the meeting led by the Chief Medical Officer (Ag) Dr. Kenneth George and his team; Gibson suggested that greater focus must be placed on managing wastage.

“Even though the formulary Committees over the years have done such a tremendous job ensuring that Barbadians get the best therapeutic classes and that the standard of drugs being delivered is raised it is very critical that when Barbadians take drugs, that they don’t put them in the cupboards and they don’t leave them and give them to the friends.”

“We have had situations where people have had months and months of medication that has never been taken. So on the one hand you have persons who are working hard to give you very good drugs but on the other hand you have the issue of non-compliance. And to me that is one of the biggest disasters we are having in the medical system right now.”

The owner of All Health Inc., stated that should patients take their medication as prescribed it would actually lower expenses incurred by the government of Barbados and lead to less hospitalisations because there would be better management of non-communicable diseases.

“This is something we want to get out there. Bajans need to take these things very seriously. It is expensive, it is serious and you can add value by making sure that you are compliant and managing your pathology in a better way,” he said.

Director of the Barbados Drug Service Maryam Hinds acknowledged that this is indeed a problem but said it would be difficult to quantify the losses.

“In our system what we try to do is counsel our patients. I know the HIV/AIDS programme has a very good method of monitoring the medication and we are trying to do that with patients. We ask them questions. Sometimes they would say “don’t refill this– I have this”, but it is difficult to estimate to give an exact figure to say this is the cost of drugs being wasted, because they are in cupboards. But we know that the problem exists and we try to counsel patients to reduce some of the wastage,” she said. (JH)