Kolkata, July 28 — The Health Department of West Bengal is set to introduce a new standard operating procedure (SOP) that mandates a weekly review of medicine inventories in state-run hospitals and medical college hospitals.
State Health and Family Welfare Minister Dr Sharadwat Mukhopadhyay has given the go-ahead for this new SOP, and the main aim behind this move is to eliminate the presence and use of expired medicines in the state-run medical entities, said an insider from the state health department.
“Once the new SOP is in force, there will be a thorough review of the medicines stock in each state-run medical entity in the state. The manufacturing and expiry dates of the stocks will be especially checked in this review exercise. Medicines found to have expired even 24 hours back will be summarily rejected and immediately destroyed to prevent possibilities of recycling them outside,” said a state health department official.
If any major lapse is detected in this weekly review system and if any hospital authorities are found to be repeat offenders of keeping expired medicines, the concerned authorities will be slapped with a show-cause notice by the state health department.
“The decision on this new SOP for the weekly audit of medicine stock has been initiated following several complaints in the last few years about patients, including new mothers and even newborns, being administered with expired saline and expired Ringer’s lactate,” the state health department official said.
Another reason, according to him, for this new SOP is the complaints that often such expired medicines from these state-run medical entities are being circulated in different voluntary health camps in an unauthorised manner, endangering the lives of the patients being treated at these health camps.
There were similar complaints of recovery of expired medicines from the different erstwhile Sebaashray health camps organised by the Trinamool Congress general secretary and the party’s Lok Sabha member, Abhishek Banerjee.
Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has ordered parallel probes by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the West Bengal Police and the state health department into the matter.
The new SOP will not only ensure the isolation of expired medicines from the stocks but also their immediate destruction to prevent the possibility of their circulation outside.