The Ministry of Health has said that “in line with Government’s commitment towards transparency, responsibility and accountability to ensure patient-centric reforms that justly hold the patients’ wellbeing at the centre of all our operations, the Ministry of Health is introducing the publication of the POYC Unit’s Out of Stock Information List every week.”

On the list published today there are 39 medicines that are shown as out of stock.

The Ministry said that the POYC Unit has a Stock List of around 700 pharmaceutical items and, to-date, there are over 115,800 registered patients benefitting from the POYC Scheme. “The published List is dynamic, and it is intended as an indicative guideline to assist our patients to be able to make better use of Government’s free pharmaceutical services.”

During these past months the Health Ministry said it “has worked incessantly to address the inherited stock shortage situation. As hitherto guaranteed, the Health Ministry’s has exerted all efforts to ensure that our patients’ needs are being timely addressed and has successfully managed to drastically reduce the Out of Stock List from over 100 stock items by less than half.”

Moreover, the Ministry said it “has embarked on its Enterprise Resource Planning exercise to identify and curb wastage, while simultaneously make effective and efficient use of all available resources across the entire national health services’ (NHS) entities.”

It said that the achievements registered to-date include:

1. The Centralisation of the entitlement data;

2. The phasing-in of IT infrastructure within key areas of the NHS to enable audit trailing of pharmaceuticals;

3. The generation of pharmaceuticals’ stock

requirements for 2014, the tracking of their usage across the NHS and the monthly adjustment thereof;

4. The compilation of cash-flow requirements, the monthly update against pharmaceuticals’ entitlement / consumption and the sharing of this information with Ministry of Finance for monitoring and budgeting purposes;

5. The setting-up of a Team with representatives from all the NHS entities with the remit to focus and timely mitigate the out of stock (OOS) situation thereby and primarily pre-empting crises;

6. The submission of the NHS’ annual pharmaceutical demand to our suppliers to facilitate timely procurement operations;

7. The introduction of practical measures, in close liaison with the Medicines Authority, to widen the opportunities for suppliers to facilitate stock availability;

“Against this backdrop, and irrespective of the nature of the out of stock situation,” the Ministry said it “is assiduously pursing all practical and effective leads to mitigate any adverse factors that patients in the POYC Scheme may experience as a result of delayed deliveries of pharmaceutical products.”

The list can be accessed as from today and is available for download here.

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