Africa-Press – Tanzania. THE government through the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children is exploring the possibility of coming up with an Information and Communication Technology system to track medicine supply and dispensation chain in public health facilities.
Minister for Health Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Dr Dorothy Gwajima said this on Saturday during a working meeting with the ministry’s directors and its institutions to discuss the status of health services provision in the country held in Dodoma City.
Dr Gwajima said that the system will help to track the dispensing of medicines by health service providers in public facilities and curb loss of medicines in its hospitals.
“We want this system to integrate all health facilities and hospitals up to the national level to cope with the ICT advances … this will enable our leaders to see everything from where they are and address challenges facing people, thus curbing medicine loss which has been the main challenge,” Dr Gwajima said.
She, however, reminded health service providers to dispense medical drugs by observing medical drug dispensing guidelines by writing generic names of drugs and not brand names, because the practice has been causing inconveniences to patients, including missing the medications.
The Minister further directed all public health facilities to immediately resume meetings for medical drugs committees from national to dispensary levels that will allow them to discuss all essential medicines used in health facilities, a move that will help to uncover the loss of medications in public health facilities.
Deputy Minister for Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Dr Godwin Mollel said that the meeting will help to know challenges facing the sector and find a better way of addressing them to ensure provision of quality services to the citizens.
He said the health sector in the country has undergone major reforms in the past five years, including the purchase of drugs, medical equipment and reagents and provision of affordable services to the citizens.
He called upon health personnel to execute their duties with high integrity in order to resolve some of the problems, because 75 per cent of the problems can be resolved by health workers themselves.
Dr Mollel urged them to work hard and ensure proper utilization of revenue in order to improve health service delivery and increase government revenue.
Speaking to the ministry staff after she was sworn in last week in Dodoma, Dr Gwajima highlighted some key areas which need improvement in the health sector in order to realise the government objectives in providing better services to the public.
The minister directed the ministry’s executives to come up with a system that will help in tracking revenue and records of people attending health facilities for proper management of the resources.
“There are some health facilities which have been allocated medical drugs but they don’t have records on how the medicines have been dispensed … they lack records on revenue collected and the patients who visit the hospitals,” she said.
Dr Gwajima also stressed the need for improving customer care in health facilities in order to make people enjoy the services.
