Preparations two to three weeks behind schedule

Lack of human resources is having an effect on the preparations for the Pharmacy Of Your Choice scheme, the officer in charge of its planning and implementation, Ray Xerri, said.

Speaking to The Times, Dr Xerri said things were about two to three weeks behind schedule.

Although he sounded confident that the first patients - from Gharghur - will start picking up medicines from their chosen pharmacy next month, Dr Xerri said another pharmacist and five pharmacy technicians were needed before the scheme could start running.

The scheme is expected to be spread across all of Malta by the end of 2008. It will kick off with patients who currently pick up their medicines from the Mosta Health Centre, spreading to Gzira in a few months' time.

Dr Xerri, the Health Division's director for special initiatives, said work was under way to input the details of patients into a specially-designed IT system. Before the system was launched there was barely any information about what medicines patients were entitled to.

Patients were asked to fill in a form with information about their entitlement, which information is now being keyed into the database. The system will inform the government pharmacy what medicines need to be sent to each pharmacy participating in the scheme every week.

The database will be connected to the government's central database, meaning that if a patient passes away there will be immediate notification to curb abuse by relatives who may decide to continue collecting a patient's medicines even after his death.

The system will also be connected to the health database to ensure that if a patient is in hospital for a long time his entitlement will become dormant.

Dr Xerri said some patients, like asthmatics, do not need the same amount of medicines every month.

An education campaign to curb wastage is also being launched, he said, adding that it was not the first time that relatives of a patient who passed away took bags full of medicines, worth thousands of liri, to the Health Division to be disposed of.

He voiced his belief that the scheme should save government money, which could then be spent in other ways, even by increasing the medicines given to patients free of charge.

He pointed out that the existing system means that many patients have to do a lot of running around to pick up the medicines they are entitled to, sometimes from different places and on different dates. Under the new scheme, all medicines, except for some bulky items and others that need professional guidance to use, can be picked up from the patient's chosen pharmacy.