A June 16 circular by MOH’s pharmacy practice & development division outlines the procedure to loan drug stocks to private health care facilities and for the return of supplies to the Health Ministry.
Doctors and pharmacists say that under a consolidated 2021 MOH budget, with nothing at all allocated for pharmacy aside from staff emoluments, individual departments that typically run out of money by July or August have no safety net while waiting for extra funding approved under the Supplementary Supply Bill to come in.
Alice Lau says the shift of allocations for MOH programmes to lump-sum budgets may cause a patient’s condition to deteriorate, while they wait for medication that can only be obtained upon approval by higher-ups.