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Saturday, July 12, 2025

Pilferage a major problem in RHAs

by

20131219

Health Min­is­ter Fuad Khan says he is work­ing on stream­lin­ing the sup­ply of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals to re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties be­cause of the amount of pil­fer­age.Khan made the state­ment af­ter he toured the San­gre Grande Hos­pi­tal, Ojoe Road, San­gre Grande, on Wednes­day."We have a large CDAP (Chron­ic Dis­ease As­sis­tance Pro­gramme) pop­u­la­tion and I am try­ing to stream­line the pop­u­la­tion, be­cause there is a lot of du­pli­ca­tion and pil­fer­age of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals," Khan said.

"So if we're look­ing af­ter 300,000 peo­ple, it looks as if we are look­ing af­ter 600,000 peo­ple. "When the health card comes in­to place we should have the trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty on that CDAP sys­tem."We have to have an in­ves­ti­ga­tion go­ing on be­cause what we pur­chase and what we sup­ply don't match."

Last week, Khan an­nounced that CDAP would be de­cen­tralised and moved from the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Prop­er­ty De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Nipdec) and put in the hands of the RHAs to do their own pur­chas­ing."We are look­ing to give the RHAs more au­ton­o­my to pur­chase their own drugs. We are look­ing at the process at giv­ing each RHA that au­ton­o­my. We have good boards and good CEOs so it should be done fast," he said.

On con­struc­tion at the San­gre Grande Hos­pi­tal, he said: "We are ad­vanc­ing. The pae­di­atric ward is func­tion­ing quite well."The ma­ter­ni­ty is al­so do­ing well and the ca­su­al­ty is do­ing a good job. There is con­struc­tion go­ing on, with a new ra­di­ol­o­gy cen­tre and a new phar­ma­cy build­ing. I've got to see how far it (con­struc­tion) has reached."He said con­struc­tion work was sup­posed to fin­ish in Au­gust this year but will now be com­plet­ed by April next year. The es­ti­mat­ed cost is $21 mil­lion.

Khan said the pur­pose of his vis­it was to make sure the health sec­tor is go­ing "in a prop­er di­rec­tion."He al­so urged peo­ple to lim­it their in­take of fats, al­co­hol and cig­a­rettes dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son.


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