ANSWER
THE MINISTER OF STATE IN THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH & FAMILY WELFARE
(DR. BHARATI PRAVIN PAWAR)
(a) to (d):
“Public Health and Hospitals” being a State subject, the primary responsibility of strengthening public healthcare system including provision of free essential drugs in public healthcare facilities, lies with the respective State Governments including Bihar. However, under National Health Mission (NHM), technical and financial support is provided to the States/UTs including Bihar to strengthen the public healthcare system including support for ensuring sufficient supply of free essential drugs at public healthcare facilities towards the objective of providing accessible, affordable and quality healthcare to all those who access public health facilities.
To ensure availability of essential drugs and reduce the Out of Pocket Expenditure (OOPE) of the patients visiting the public health facilities, Government has rolled out the Free Drugs Service Initiative (FDSI) under National Health Mission (NHM).
Under this, financial support is provided to States / UTs including Bihar for provision of free essential medicines in public health facilities based on the requirements posted by them in their Programme Implementation Plans (PIPs) within their overall resource envelope.
Support under the scheme is available for Procurement of drugs and strengthening /setting up robust systems of procurement, Quality Assurance, Supply chain management and warehousing, Prescription audit, grievance redressal, dissemination of Standard Treatment Guidelines and Establishment of IT enabled platform DVDMS (Drugs & Vaccine Distribution Management System) for monitoring the real time status of procurement and availability of essential medicines.
DVDMS is a web-based Supply Chain Management System that deals in purchase, supply, distribution and inventory management of various drugs and has an in-built provision of monitoring and checking the availability of medicine at all facilities at district and state level.
Further, Ministry has recommended facility wise Essential Medicines List (EML) to be made available at the public healthcare facilities. The number of drugs under EML at various levels of Public Healthcare facilities is as below:-
i. Sub Health Centre Health & wellness centre (SHC-HWCs)– 105
ii. Primary Health Centre Health & wellness centre (PHC-HWCs)- 172
iii. Community Health Centres (CHCs)- 455
iv. District Hospital (DHs)- 544
However, States have the flexibility to add more medicines and Essential Drugs List (EDL) of States vary from State to State.
In addition to this, the States are encouraged to do prescription audit to improve the quality of care provided by the health facilities and also to ensure prescription of generic and rational use of drugs. Standard Treatment Guidelines (STGs) have been developed for ensuring rational use of drugs and preventing all forms of wastages.
As per the information received from the State Government of Bihar, the State makes essential drugs available to all the government hospitals free of cost and has been spending considerable amount on procurement of quality generic drugs for government hospitals. Besides this, the State also gets financial support under Free Drug Services Initiative of NHM. As per the information received from the State of Bihar, the State has received Rs. 160 crores for the financial year 2021-22 under NHM Free Drug Services.
Generic drugs are being supplied free of cost to all the government hospitals in the State of Bihar including the hospitals located in the district of Gopalganj.
Further, State has informed that DVDMS has been launched in the State and formation of Drugs and Therapeutic Committee in all the districts and at State HQ level is underway to monitor all the issues related to equitable and rational distribution of drugs, which encompasses check on over prescription and wastage of drugs by the hospitals.
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