Illegal sale of medicines on the streets has become very common in most parts of the country while some hospitals and health centres face shortage of medicines and Kiunga hospital in Western Province is no exception.<\/p>\n
Located in the heart of Kiunga in the North Fly district, the hospital\u2019s medicine supply runs out nearly every day and many patients have been suffering.<\/p>\n
Mathew Tapele, who is a long-time resident there, confirmed with the Post-Courier yesterday, that he witnessed these issues when he visited the hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to Kiunga hospital for treatment due to fever, cough and severe illness. I also had a sore on my knee.<\/p>\n
\u201cInside the outpatient there were four trainee nurses working there so I gave the paper containing my symptoms I was experiencing and explained everything I felt of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the conversation, one the female trainee nurse told me that all the medicine supply had ran out except for Malawan for malaria as there was no Panadol, no Amoxicillin, no cough medicine and even no supply for first aid kit.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat they did was, they wrote down the type of medicine on my paper and told me to go to the pharmacy to purchase them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Mr Tapele said he then went straight to the pharmacy and bought all of those medicine that were prescribed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt cost me roughly K68. I wonder how poor mothers, children and fathers feel about this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said the other issue is that while people are suffering from shortage of medical drugs, street vendors are selling medicines on the streets of Kiunga.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I asked where these medicines came from, they refused to comment and continued their selling,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He is calling on the Western Provincial Health Authority to look into these issues of how these drugs are sold openly on the street.<\/p>\n
When asked to comment on this matter, Western PHA CEO Dr Miriam Boga did not respond to questions asked by the Post Courier.<\/p>\n
However, certain health workers in public health facilities are stealing medicines from the clinics and are selling them to street vendors, private clinics and other unauthorised entities, compromising patient safety and care. This is according to Health Department\u2019s Acting Technical Adviser Compliance, Licensing and Inspections Dum Iwa.<\/p>\n
Mr Iwa conducted a number of operations and surveillance activities since 2022 to 2024.<\/p>\n
Based on the key findings from these operations in Port Moresby and other provinces, it has been revealed that there is also an involvement of some pharmaceutical companies doing illegal sales with unlicensed dealers, thereby undermining the integrity of the supply chain.<\/p>\n
Mr Iwa also revealed that there is collusion and corruption as evident during this inter-government Joint Operations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illegal sale of medicines on the streets has become very common in most parts of the country while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4315],"tags":[105,60874,4326,60875,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-140213","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-illegal-sale-of-medicines","10":"tag-medication","11":"tag-shortage-of-medicines-and-kiunga-hospital","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114588651744265703","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}