More than 12 thousand people have registered for the Free Medicine Program.
Assistant Minister for Health Veena Bhatnagar today launched the initiative which has been plagued with delays after an initial start date of the 1st January, 2015.
Today’s launch formalizes the partnership of 49 private pharmacies involved in the program.
‘’More than 100 000 forms has been distributed to all the health facilities throughout Fiji, but currently, 12 209 completed forms have been sent to the headquarters, out of which 3234 from the central division, 7199 from the western division and 1776 forms have been received from the Northern Division and of course our team, they’re working day and night to fastrack’’.
Bhatnagar has also confirmed that currently all medicine under the program is been dispensed manually with each pharmacy required to have their own register. Reconciliations are scheduled on a monthly basis with government.
‘’We will have to install our software upgrade, but that will take alittle bit more time, but actually now, when the manual dispersion has really started, so I mean we can take our time to upgrade our system because, we need funds as well, we need software for that’’.
The Assistant Minister says all individuals 18 years and over who earn less than 20 thousand dollars a year qualify for the program and should register ensuring their dependents are also covered.
The Free Medicine program was launched at Superdrug Pharmacy in Nabua.
