25% of imported medicines ‘wasted’

JEDDAH: Experts estimated the proportion of wasted or damaged imported medicines stand at 25 percent.
Pharmacist Sobhi Al-Haddad, a member of the Saudi Pharmaceutical Society, revealed to a local publication that the Kingdom suffers from a phenomenon called “medication wastage.”
“The clear evidence on this phenomenon is that the Ministry of Health resorts to destroying the surplus medicines,” he asserted.
According to the data of the Saudi Customs, he added, the Kingdom’s imports of medicines between the years 2006 to 2015 were worth SR146.72 billion, of which the value of about SR22.14 billion was imported in 2015.
“The Kingdom’s imports of medicines over the past year accounted 3.4 percent of the value of the total imports during the same year,” said Al-Haddad.
He noted that the Kingdom earlier this year reduced the budget for medicines and medical supplies by 50 percent. The decision stated by canceling 30 percent of the items of all the agreements with suppliers whose contracts are valued at less than SR100 million, exempting in this regard the agreements on vaccines and serums.
A former professor of pharmacology at King Saud University in Riyadh, Hisham Abu Odeh, said a Saudi study conducted in 2003 and published in an American journal on drug wastage showed that annually hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted, asserting that matters have exacerbated due to increased drug consumption and population growth.
Abu Odeh noted that about 25 percent of the imported medications are wasted and thrown into the garbage. He blamed workers and professionals in the health sector for this wastage because it is easier for them to have access to medicines and drugs, and always get more than they need. “This is not a personal remark, the information is based on research,” he confirmed.
Some of the reasons for this wastage include the poor planning, the bad management of medications, not knowing the actual requirements to determine the annual budget for the importation of medicines, the absence of patient records, and the absence of the correct storage measures, among others.
Clinical chemist Abdul-Aziz Sadeqi explains that a field trip to the warehouses and stores, and the transport means of the Ministry of Health revealed that large quantities of drugs were found to be decomposing due to extreme temperatures, exceeding 50° Celsius.
Recently Abdullah Falah Al-Otaibi, a media analyst interested in health affairs, launched an initiative to maintain medicines and drugs from being wasted by encouraging the public to donate surplus medicines and drugs to the needy through the correct channels. The initiative has identifiers on social media sites.