Some surg­eries at the na­tion's hos­pi­tals are be­ing pushed back be­cause of a wors­en­ing drug short­age.

In a CNC3 News re­port last night, it was re­vealed that the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Prop­er­ty De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (Nipdec), which is charged with pur­chas­ing cru­cial med­i­cine, had run out of mon­ey.

The re­port stat­ed that pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties are run­ning out of drugs such as an­tibi­otics to treat pa­tients and that in the past few weeks a num­ber of surg­eries were re­duced due to a lim­it­ed sup­ply of drugs.

The re­port said Nipdec, which is re­spon­si­ble for plac­ing the or­ders for the drugs with the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies, ran out of mon­ey months ago.

It said med­ical sup­pli­ers are cur­rent­ly owed over $100 mil­lion by the Gov­ern­ment, but had been paid 50 per cent of their out­stand­ing monies over a month ago. The re­port said Nipdec can­not place or­ders for the drugs un­til it gets con­fir­ma­tion from the Min­istry of Health.

Nid­pec needs $1 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly to suf­fi­cient­ly sup­ply phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and non-phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals to the pub­lic health sec­tor, but the com­pa­ny on­ly gets half of that. The State com­pa­ny re­ceived just over $400 mil­lion to cov­er drugs and med­ical sup­plies in the last bud­get.

Close to $300 mil­lion was spent for med­ical and med­ical sup­plies with­in six months. The re­main­der was used to set­tle out­stand­ing bills. Since then Nipdec has been with­out mon­ey to pur­chase drugs the re­port said, adding Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has ad­vised Cab­i­net on the is­sue and a fi­nal de­ci­sion would be made on Thurs­day.

Deyals­ingh told CNC3 he would make a state­ment on the mat­ter on Fri­day and would deal with what he de­scribed as a peren­ni­al prob­lem.

But in re­sponse to the re­port lat­er in the news­cast, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said ad­di­tion­al fund­ing will be made avail­able to Nipdec.

Calls to Deyals­ingh's cell­phone last night went unan­swered.