His comments come amid concerns over theft and misuse of medicines in public health facilities, as well as persistent shortages of essential drugs.<\/p>\n
Wakida attributed part of the problem to what he described as a Shs150 billion funding gap for essential medicines and said government should address the financing shortfall alongside efforts to fight theft.<\/p>\n
He called for the government to provide the Shs150 billion needed to close the essential medicines gap in the 2027\/28 financial year budget and supplementary funding.<\/p>\n
Wakida also proposed increasing government spending on medicines to at least Shs10,000 per person annually.<\/p>\n
He further called for the full digitalisation of the National Medical Stores (NMS) medicine-tracking system, from warehouses to health facilities and ultimately patients.<\/p>\n
He said the system should include public dashboards showing what medicines each health facility receives, allowing citizens to monitor deliveries and identify shortages.<\/p>\n
“Distinguish theft from system failure: publish verified stock-out days per facility and stop blanket arrest of staff who prescribe outside during confirmed stock-outs,” Wakida said.<\/p>\n
He said genuine cases of medicine theft should be investigated and prosecuted, but authorities should also establish whether a health worker was operating in a facility where the required medicines were unavailable.<\/p>\n
Wakida said the country should address three problems simultaneously: inadequate financing for medicines, theft and poor management of procured supplies.<\/p>\n
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He also raised concerns about medicines expiring before reaching patients, saying accountability should extend beyond health workers to the systems responsible for procurement, storage and distribution.<\/p>\n
“Yes, some medicines are stolen. But we are also failing to budget enough, failing to manage what we procure, and allowing medicines to expire before they reach the patient,” he said.<\/p>\n
Wakida said arresting health workers alone would not solve medicine shortages in public facilities.<\/p>\n
“If we want full shelves in our health centres, we must confront all three problems–not just arrest the health worker standing in front of an empty shelf,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kibuku Member of Parliament Patrick Godfrey Wakida has warned against the blanket arrest of health workers accused of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[58],"tags":[63,83,265,321,262,268,1988,96,261,264,263,266,153],"class_list":["post-410071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uganda","tag-africa","tag-business","tag-current-events","tag-east-africa","tag-economy","tag-governance","tag-health-and-medicine","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-sports","tag-trade","tag-travel","tag-uganda"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@africa\/117212330973201420","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}