CARACAS, (Reuters) – The decline in oil prices has forced Venezuela to place smaller medicine orders and buy cheaper drugs, a state health provider said yesterday, as patient complaints over shortages mount.
“We’re buying three months of inventories for a medicine. We’re working with tighter inventories but guaranteeing the medicine is here in the country,” said Carlos Rotondaro, a general who has run the Venezuelan Institute for Social Security (IVSS) for 12 years.
It used to make about two major purchases of medicines per year with inventories that lasted eight to 12 months, said Rotondaro, who contacted Reuters in response to news coverage of protests over drug availability.
“Given the drop in oil revenue, we of course cannot maintain the same framework, so we looked for alternatives.”
Now, they are purchasing smaller lots four to five times a year, he said.
The institute, based in Caracas, runs 38 hospitals, 67 primary attention centers and 54 pharmacies meant to provide free medicine for chronic health issues.
The Socialist-run OPEC country has also tapped bilateral agreements with allied countries, including Cuba and Argentina, or lesser-known laboratories, including some in India, for drugs.
“In some areas we’ve increased purchases. The price of these medicines is much lower, not because they’re bad quality but rather because they have lower cost structures,” said Rotondaro, the institute’s president.
Some health activists and doctors have questioned the quality of medicine acquired through the bilateral deals. Rotondaro said they undergo the same screenings as all other drugs.
Flatly denying medicine shortages, Rotondaro said any missing drugs were due to “one-off” problems, like “occasional” delays in allocation of funds under complex currency controls or backlogs at foreign laboratories.
Many Venezuelans scoff at official denials of shortages, which the country’s pharmaceutical association puts at seven out of every 10 drugs.
Increasingly, Venezue-lans are spending hours in queues, turning to the black market, or trying to cobble together enough money to buy drugs abroad. Or, they simply go without.
On Thursday in the latest small demonstration, patients with cancer, hemophilia, or transplanted organs protested what they consider policy paralysis in the face of scarcity of products including chemotherapy drugs and medicine to avert rejection of transplanted organs.
“They say there is a scarcity. That is simply not true,” said Rotondaro. “We only have one-off problems with 6.3 percent of (our) 232 high-cost medicines.”
