Mohali health centres face 40% medicine shortage

Mohali: Even as the Punjab government claims to be giving priority to health services and the chief minister bats for excellent medical facilities, health centres in Mohali are facing critical shortage of medicines upto 40%, forcing people to buy even basic drugs from private medical stores.

Also, discrepancies have been detected at such centres pertaining to delivery of health services to the patients.

These observations were made during an inspection carried out by a team of doctors assigned by the office of Mohali civil surgeon. Recently, a team led by assistant civil surgeon (ACS) Dr Renu Singh and district family welfare programme officer (DFPO) Dr Nidhi.

The team went to check the facilities at health and wellness centres (HWC) and at one such centre at Boothgarh, the team observed that nearly 40% of the medicines were found to be unavailable.

During the inspection, nearly 40% of the medicines were found to be unavailable at the wellness centre in Mohali. It was found that there were only 40 medicnes were available out of a total of 66 prescribed.

Civil surgeon Dr Adarshpal Kaur said, “Our teams are checking the HWCs with an aim to find availably of medicines and other facilities being provided to the patients. This is a routine exercise. As far as shortage of medicines are concerned, it is provided by the state and whatever is provided is distributed through such HWCs.”

The ACS and DFPO visited one of the HWC, where they also found that the RCH registers was incomplete of which they took very serious view and brought to knowledge of the civil surgeon.

They checked diary of Asha workers also regarding distribution of family planning materials and found that it was not being done as per the directions.

The team also checked birth death records at PHC and found that there was cutting and over writing in some forms, which was objectionable. after which all ANM’s were asked to note that no cutting overwriting in forms would be tolerated.