Doctors in North West say that only about half of the medicines on the province’s essential drugs list are available and that this is severely impacting the level of care they can provide.
Among the drug shortages doctors report are painkillers, Vitamin B12, calcium tablets, iron tablets, the flu vaccine, urine test sticks, antibiotics and drugs to treat hypertension, diabetes, epilepsy, psychiatric conditions, cryptococcal meningitis, epilepsy and pneumonia. Picture: Aaron Favila / APWhile health officials in North West debate what defines a “crisis” of essential medicine supplies, *Tendai is panicking.
“I’m hurt and my symptoms are back. I don’t know what I can do – only to watch myself die,” she says. Doctors say that her condition could become so severe that it could weaken her heart and threaten her life. Doctors have flagged these problems for at least two years and say the shortages have occurred intermittently for the past few years. In 2018, the province’s medicines depot in Mahikeng was at the centre of a go-slow that severely compromised healthcare services that year.
“After Life Esidimeni [the tragedy in 2016 when 144 mental health patients died when the Gauteng department of health moved about 1 700 of them from Life Esidimeni facilities to unsuitable facilities), the ombudsman criticised doctors for not speaking out. It set a precedent and it should be our duty to say when things are not right, and we know our patients are being turned away at the pharmacy windows,” one doctor says.
Some pharmacists are already resorting to dispensing smaller quantities of drugs to patients and asking them to return more frequently in the hope that stocks will be replenished by their next visit. Sometimes, as in Tendai’s case, they have nothing at all to give their patients.
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