The State Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Corporation (SPMC) and the State Pharmaceutical Corporation (SPC) together have the capacity of manufacturing and supplying superior quality pharmaceuticals conforming to the highest standards to the people of Sri Lanka and the National People’s Power (NPP) Government will be upgrading and strengthening both entities to ensure the good health of the Sri Lankan population stated Consultant Community Physician and former Professor of Kelaniya University, Chrishantha Abeysena.
“We know that the rank of the present Health Care System is not so good compared to other countries. One reason for that is the quality of healthcare and also it is related to the out of pocket healthcare expenditure of the average Sri Lankan family, which is more than 51 percent of the total family expenses. The other 49 percent from the Government.
According to the WHO guidelines, the out of pocket expenditure for healthcare of the family should be less than 20 percent of the total family expenses. Therefore, we have to take steps to minimise the out of pocket healthcare expenditure of the people.” Speaking further Prof. Abeysena stated, “One main reason for the increase of the out of pocket expenditure of the people is high drug prices and unavailability of drugs, especially essential drugs in our hospitals. The second reason is the unavailability of investigations in our hospitals.
Therefore, according to our policy, the NPP Government will allocate more funds to the betterment of the healthcare system. For the last several years, the Governments in power spent less than 1.2 percent – 1.5 percent of the GDP on healthcare. We hope to increase the amount spent on healthcare up to 2.5 percent of the GDP next year and within the next five years we want to increase it up to 5 percent of the GDP as per the recommendations of the WHO. In that case we will be able to give drugs free of charge to the patients through the Government Healthcare System and also to carry out quality investigations for the patients.”
“The other thing is that the Government Healthcare System has a problem of accountability. As matters stand, no one is accountable. We want to establish a system with accountability. I think that we have to reform the Government Healthcare System from the top to the bottom. For example, if there is an error in the health care system such as wrong or inappropriate treatment or drugs of poor quality, there should be a system to investigate that error by an independent committee and we should take steps not just to minimise but to eliminate such errors in the future. It is also the responsibility of the Government Healthcare Systems to inform the affected person or persons of the report of that independent committee, so there is transparency in accountability. There are many things in relation to accountability that we have to improve,” elaborated Prof. Abeysena. “When we talk about our healthcare system, primary healthcare is very important. Therefore, we hope to allocate one family physician for each 5,000 to 10,000 of the population, so the family physician is responsible for the health of his or her people. The family physician is closely linked with the MOH and the hospital in the area, so if he or she wants he or she can refer the patients to the hospital. According to this concept, the family physicians are also linked with other healthcare services, for example physiotherapy and mental health screening and counseling. Preventive care is also handled by the MOH. We hope to reallocate, by that I mean to increase the MOH areas within our country. At the moment there are nearly 350 MOH areas, so we can increase that number according to the population then we can improve the efficiency of the services of Medical Officers of Health. In other words, the present preventive care services and the hospital care services are not so satisfactory. It is the same with nursing and medical care services, so we have to improve those services.
There are so many things we are going to establish and introduce to our Healthcare System to improve the quality and patient safety,” said Prof. Abeysena.
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