Update on Western Cape Health chronic medication dispensing
12 Apr 2012
Western Cape Health MEC Theuns Botha announced that the automated dispensing of patient medication parcels will resume as from Thursday, 12 April 2012.
At the beginning of the month, the new service provider, UTi Pharma, informed the department of Health of backlogs in the dispensing and production processes at their new facility, resulting in the delay in the delivery of patient medicine parcels to facilities, mostly in the Metro, one facility in the Winelands (TC Newman Community Day Centre) and less than five facilities on the West Coast.
The delay was caused by the complexity of the patient data transfer of 200 000 patient files from the previous contractor to the new contractor, implementation of new business processes, together with the commissioning of sophisticated new equipment by the new contractor. The service provider is required to package and deliver approximately 175 000 patient parcels a month to 118 health facilities, most of which are located in the Metropole.
For the past two weeks, the department and the service provider have been dispensing medicines manually whilst the systems referred to above have been activated. From 12 April 2012, the contractor will resume deliveries of pre-packed prescriptions to many of the facilities and the contractor will over the next month progressively increase the numbers of subscriptions that are pre-packed until the full quota of both new and existing patient scripts is achieved.