Health Min­is­ter Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe says the Gov­ern­ment is work­ing to ad­dress sup­ply chain and dis­tri­b­u­tion chal­lenges af­fect­ing the avail­abil­i­ty of med­ica­tion un­der the Chron­ic Dis­ease As­sis­tance Pro­gramme (CDAP), main­tain­ing that while short­ages may oc­cur at in­di­vid­ual fa­cil­i­ties, pa­tients should still be able to ac­cess med­ica­tion else­where with­in the pub­lic health sys­tem.

“The re­sponse I’ve had so far is that al­though you might have short­ages here and there, there’s al­ways the op­por­tu­ni­ty in any par­tic­u­lar RHA to try and source the drug if it’s not avail­able at one health cen­tre,” Bo­doe said.

He ex­plained that phar­ma­cists across the re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties (RHAs) have been in­struct­ed to con­tact neigh­bour­ing health cen­tres and phar­ma­cies when­ev­er a pre­scribed med­ica­tion is un­avail­able.