NHIS providers dispense wrong drugs

The NHIA research director noted that the prescription of drugs was partly determined by the level of the caregiver or facility

Some service providers under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) have been dispensing wrong drugs to some patients who are registered with the scheme, the Director of Research and Development at the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), Mr Osei-Boateng Acheampong, has revealed.

According to him, the NHlA had realised that drugs prescribed for some patients were not appropriate to cure the diseases suffered by the patients.

He said in most cases, the drugs were above the illnesses for which they were prescribed and that situation usually arose because some prescribers were not properly educated on the drugs to prescribe at which level of care.

Mr Acheampong made this known in Tamale when he addressed the media on the sidelines of a workshop for various service providers in the three regions of the north.

The workshop sought to sensitise the service providers to the expanded medicine list and the guidelines regarding the prescription and dispensation of drugs under the NHIS.

The NHIA research director noted that the prescription of drugs was partly determined by the level of the caregiver or facility.

He said while facilities such as regional and teaching hospitals qualified as secondary facilities, district hospitals, clinics and Community Health Planning Services (CHPS) compounds qualified as primary health caregivers.

Mr Acheampong explained that not all drugs could be administered at the primary level of care because conditions that were handled by these facilities did not require them to dispense those drugs.

"When a patient's condition requires a drug that can only be administered at the secondary level, then it means the patient, if he or she is at the primary facility, must be referred to the secondary level facility for adequate care," he further explained.

Mr Acheampong hinted that the NHlA would soon introduce a new standardised prescription form to iron out some inconsistencies that resulted in the lack of a uniform prescription form.

He said, for instance, that payments made to providers for drugs alone constituted 58 per cent of all payments, adding that that resulted from such inconsistencies in the prescription and dispensing of drugs.