dental college in Srinagar, IGGDC Jammu and Directorate of Indian System of Medicine.
While the prevailing system offers short duration of the members and the hybrid structure changes quote often, the main demerit of this temporary process is lack of coordination, slow disposal, weak testing and least accountability. As doctors assigned the job have to analyze the contracts for 3000 items every year, patient care suffers. There is a huge mismatch and gap between the approval, ordering a purchase, delivery and consumption. No member of any of these committees is under anybody’s control.
There is one such committee in the SKIMS that operates within the institute without any coordination with any of the nine committees. With SKIMS’s requirements excluded, the state health services have an average purchase order of not less than Rs 50 crore a year. “It will increase as at time, funds do not get utilized for one or the other reason,” an officer said.
Now when the proposal is being submitted to the cabinet for formal approval, the blueprint of the JKSMC suggests the Director Chittranjan Mobile Hospital will be its ex-officio MD for the time being and later it will be filled by way of rotation between IAS and KAS cadres at the rank of special secretary. It will have two GMs and a number of supervisors and the overall staff would not exceed 22. The corporation will have an 11-member board. The corporation can have technical members and it must have warehouse facilities at divisional and district levels. Tamil Nadu model will be adopted to make it a success. It will be only after its functioning that SKIMS will be asked to change its rules and become part of JKMSC which will increase the cake and help economize the purchase further.
While the cabinet will revive the decision that it has taken on June 23, 2003, the government will have to do many more things to clean the system and ensure the products are qualitatively better. On this front, upgrading the drug organization is no less a priority, insiders in the health policy making, said.
Right now, the State Drug Control organization is facing two peculiar problems. Firstly, it is the basic infrastructure and secondly the manpower. In the meeting that Omar Abdullah presided last week, it was decided that the building in Dalgate that houses the police controlled FSL shall be vacated and given to the Drug Control Organization so that its space issue is settled. In Jammu, it already has enough of space, Kashmir Life was informed. The organization runs a testing laboratory; one each at Srinagar and Jammu but it lacks modern system of testing and analysis.
On the manpower front, sources said, it might take more time. Till then, the Chief Minister has directed for availing the facilities in the private sector. Given the massive load, Omar has already called for public-private partnership so that quality medicines are supplied to the market. Though J&K government lacks any idea of size of pharma market in J&K, it just knows that there are 15510 drugs sales establishments – both retailers and wholesalers.
Conservative estimates suggest that the overall drug consumption (at maximum retail prices) in J&K is around Rs 1000 crore of which one-tenth is alternative medicine and the rest is allopathic. Health service officials informed the meeting last week that there are 76 drug and cosmetics manufacturers who have a yearly turnover of Rs 3100 crore of which products worth Rs 600 crore are consumed within the state. An observation everybody is so keen to ignore is that allopathic intake is ninety percent in Kashmir unlike Jammu where Ayurveda is the main priority.
The overall system of testing the drugs is not adequate, even at all India level. Health ministry officers said there are only 38 drug testing laboratories across India of which seven belong to the central government and rest to the state governments. The interesting twist in the entire story is that only one percent of the overall manufacture is being tested across India and in 99% of the cases, the consumers and the buyer rely on the quality assurances based on results that pharma companies provide from their in-house facilities!
The capacities, right now, are highly inadequate. Existing infrastructure cannot permit beyond 2500 tests a year in J&K. Insiders in the Drug Control organization said since April when the ongoing spurious drug issue started becoming the front page news, they have been working in two shifts. In Jammu and in Srinagar, they have conducted 363 tests and identified 12 sub-standard medicines. This was possible
