Tshwane clinics share medicines amid stock outs
Health workers at Maria Rantho, KT Motubatse and other Soshanguve clinics are complaining that incorrectly filled orders from the regional pharmacy have forced clinics to share medicines among themselves.
A health worker* at Maria Rantho Clinic claims that incorrectly filled orders have become a recurring problem and have resulted in shortages at clinics.
“Regional pharmacy is the one with problem and believe me we are running short of Panado tablets now,” she told OurHealth.
A pharmacist* at one of the affected clinics claimed that the health facility was forced to borrow 150 packets of Panado from Soshanguve Block TT Clinic after the regional pharmacy only delivered 200 of the 1500 packets ordered last month.
Just last week, the civil society Stop Stock Outs reported shortages of antiretorvirals at Pretoria’s Steve Biko Academic Hospital.
Staff* at KT Motubatse Clinic said they have experienced minimal shortages due to the persistence of the clinic’s pharmacist, who they said “engaged fearlessly” with suppliers.
Tshwane District of Health pharmacy personnel agreed that there are sometimes problems with medicines delivery to clinics, but argued that problems stemmed from clinics’ late orders. They added that clinics also sometimes fail to place emergency orders that allow the regional pharmacy to respond to medicine shortages.
*Names have been withheld to protect health workers from victimisation
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.
Tshwane clinics share medicines amid stock outs
by tshilidzituwani, Health-e News
August 27, 2014