The workshop on NLEM-based hospital formulary in a public health facility, spearheaded by Dr Suresh Saravdekar, Director, The Rural Health & Education Centre, helped gain more understanding about the best practices in procurement that India can inculcate to improve its own drug quality standards. It started off with a presentation by Dr Saravdekar which clarified various aspects of the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) and its purview as well as objectives. Then, he went on to explain about monitoring and evaluation of procurement practices. He also gave a rundown on various challenges faced at the implementation level. He also put forth his recommendations for improving the current processes in tendering and procurement to improve their efficacy.
Thus, he set the stage for a brief panel discussion which followed. His panelists were Dr Pravin Shingare, Director, Directorate of Medical Education and Research (DMER); Dr VK Shukla, Director, Institute of Medical Sciences, BHU; Dr DK Sharma, Medical Superintendent, AIIMS, Dr AK Gupta, Medical Superintendent, PGIMER, Chandigarh; Dr Om Prakash Upadhyay, Medical Superintendent, SS Hospital, Indian Medical Sciences-Banaras Hindu University (IMS- BHU)
Dr Gupta, spoke on the challenges in ensuring best practices in procurement with insights from his own experiences at PGIMER, Chandigarh. He also shared how these challenges were dealt with in his organisation in details. The difficulty in getting doctors to prescribe only generic drugs were one of the challenges he highlighted. Dr Shukla agreed with Dr Gupta’s views and stated that the skewed way of providing financial incentives is also a serious problem. He further informed that it is high time we came up with standard guidelines to streamline the processes. Dr Shingare gave his account of handling existing challenges and the role WHO GMP guidelines are playing in making the tendering and contracting procedures simpler and more efficacious. Dr Sharma touched up on issues like the rational use of medicines, encouraging the quality and use of generic medicines, and testing procedures of medicines. Dr Upadhyay advocated better pricing regulations to deal with some these issues. He also reiterated that public health doctors must be mandated to prescribe generic medicines.
The panelists also rooted for constant upgradation of quality standards in medicines and urged implementation of GMP standards recommended by WHO to upgrade the quality of drugs.
The delegates also got the opportunity to share their experiences in this sphere and exchange learnings.