The Health Ministry has undertaken certain steps aimed that improving the supply chain management of drugs and medical supplies in order to better track contract deliveries.
This was revealed by Permanent Secretary Malcolm Watkins, who informed the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee on Friday that the system he inherited last year was broken.
“We have inherited a system from my assumption of office that was extremely broken and more [specifically], the availability of the data you required to forecast and quantify was almost non-existent or extremely exhorted,” the PS stated during the PAC meeting in the Parliament Chambers as the Ministry of Health came under scrutiny in the 2016 Auditor General Report.
Earlier in the meeting, former PS at the then Public Health Ministry in 2016, Trevor Thomas had admitted, during queries from Government Member of Parliament Vishwa Mahadeo who raised concerns of drug shortages and expired drugs in the system, that there were “some weaknesses in the tracking and managing” of contracts for the supply and delivery of pharmaceuticals for which payments were made.
“I think one of the challenges we had… we keep reconciling the items so that whenever it heads into stock, we get the information from the stores that the items have actually come in… It’s something that we’ve been working with because there have been times when the suppliers don’t deliver as per schedules,” Thomas stated.
But his successor, PS Watkins explained that having met an extremely broken monitoring system, he has since been working for almost one year to rebuild this. He was at the time responding to questions raised by Opposition MP Juretha Fernandes, who had enquired about what the Ministry is doing to monitor the receipt of drugs and medical supplies to prevent delays in deliveries.
“In the last 10 months, we have set up a system of ensuring that the warehouse tracks the distribution data to the region so we can develop historical trends which we have to recreate; we ensured that the inventory in the warehouse is more accurate with more frequent cycle counts and inventory management currently; we’ve established a more robust reconciliation tracking system and assigned more staffing to track the deliveries of medical supplies and drugs coming in at real time; we have a daily meeting that tracks the operation flow of the Ministry headed by me directly, and in this meeting, we track the Delivery Notes within a 48-hour cycle to ensure that we know exactly how much Delivery Notes are pending, that the SRNs (Service Receipts Notes) are prepared and are moved to the right department for reconciliation and it moves from the supplier product to the accounting department to be married with payment vouchers. We are hoping with these systems that we’re putting in place that it will begin to improve the systemic nature of the supply chain management,” Watkins stated.
Moreover, another Opposition parliamentarian, David Patterson further queried into the tracking system that was in place previously, pointing out that it was a foreign-funded system that was implemented.
However, the PS indicated that the software system – “Software Management System” – was not being properly updated and because of this deficiency, it would have taken years to rebuild hence the new systems put in place to better track the supply and delivery of pharmaceuticals.
“The system is only functionable based upon the level of expertise and the level of discipline the Human Resources apply to it so kind of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. For the past five years or so, you would’ve seen that the system went through a decline to a point where it became so broken that the data in it was not usable… Once that data is unavailable, I am unable to forecast and do better contracts,” he posited.
According to Watkins, the software uses an advanced system shipment system, whereby the contract is preloaded and when the delivery is made, it is automatically reconciled and deducted from the outstanding balance. He went on to outline that “If that system is not functioning very well, it is very difficult for me to [fix the system]… In normal circumstances, to rebuild that would take years but we are currently doing that in record time,” the PS contended.
