25 Jan 2006

PNG's Eastern Highlands suffers drugs shortage

4:45 pm on 25 January 2006

The general hospital in the administrative centre of the eastern Highlands in Papua New Guinea has admitted shortages of drugs.

The district's chief liquor licensing commissioner, Peter Kaibuino, is complaining about how his wife was treated at the hospital.

Mr Kaibuino said medical officers had ordered him to go out to private drug stores to buy penicillin and injection fluids for his wife.

But the chief executive of the Goroka hospital, Dr Pomoso Warima, says patients are sent away to pharmacies to buy medicines in non-urgent cases.

"We have all the drugs that is necessary to treat patients and everything. This is only for the outpatient patients, you know when they come visit and give them treatment and we give them prescriptions to purchase them at the local pharmacies."

Dr Warima promises to make the supply chain smoother.