Minister of Health assures public drugs not expired

The Minister of Health, Jerome Ludvaune, has assured the general public in Vanuatu that all the drugs given out to people by the hospitals and health facilities throughout the country have never been expired.

He reminded the people that the doctors who work in the country’s hospitals were trained and qualified professionals who knew what they were doing.

The minister made his comments following a news report raised concerns in the social media – Facebook, recently about the use of ‘expired’ drugs at the Vila Central Hospital by a family member of a patient at the hospital.

The story received hundreds of comments and concerns as a result about the use of expired drugs, which alleged that doctors at the VCH were giving expired drugs to their patients.

“I am confirming that every hospital and health facility in Vanuatu including the VCH in Port Vila, where everyday people go for treatment, that these medicines were not drugs that had already expired.

“There are no expired drugs that we are giving people who go to the hospitals to receive treatment,” he repeated.

“The case which happened, and referred to in the Facebook story, the doctor needed to make a decision on it, because of its special situation.

“Before going on, I wish to confirm at this juncture, that our doctors are trained and qualified professionals and they provide the very best service to the people of the country.”

“Now, at the time this particular incident happened, the doctor who administered this particular drug, called Clindamycin, to the patient at the hospital who was allergic to penicillin, the drug needed to treat her, because it would cause her severe irritation and inflammation,” Minister Ludvaune explained.

Clindamycin, we’ve been informed is a donated drug that is not in the national drugs list of the medical service of the country, and it is usually used as an alternative antibiotic in patients with severe allergy with Penicillin at the VCH.

“The patient’s body was allergic to penicillin, so the doctor had to treat the sick patient.

“The doctor was in front of this patient who was very sick and had to make a decision.

“The decision this doctor made was good and it was not bad.

“This medicine the doctor prescribed for the patient helped her to start to make a slow recovery and she felt better.

“Later on when she was much, much better after her family got her the same drug that was not expired, she returned to the hospital with her family and thanked the doctor that treated her.

“It’s true, the medicine was expired for some weeks,” the Minister of Health acknowledged, “but it was still good for use to help patients.

“It can expire but the drug’s lifespan to the extent it fully deteriorated is longer to when it is totally unsafe to use.

“If it was only some days that the medicine expired then it still had 90 to 99 per cent of the substance in the drug to treat a sick patient,” he explained.

The Daily Post understands that the expiry dates on drugs show their shelf life to help drugstores make new orders, however, the drugs could still be used for up to six months after the expiry date shown on the drug labels. A

nd that the drug used to treat the patient in question was expired by two weeks, which was still good to use treat patients with severe allergy to penicillin.

“So, the doctors don’t make mistakes, they know when the decision they make for a patient is right.

“But because of the nature of the confidentiality of their work to keep patient information confidential, doctors don’t talk very much about their decisions regarding drugs or their patients.

“Unfortunately, the public when they saw the news that appeared in Facebook, they believed the worst, and because there was no explanation from the doctors, the public’s perception was that there are worse things happening at the hospital regarding drugs.”