Enough medicine for 4,000 years, say hospital executives

Enough medicine for 4,000 years, say hospital executives

DİYARBAKIR - Like an overstuffed sack of potatoes, a university hospital in southeastern Turkey says its stores of drugs and medical equipment are piled so high supplies are virtually falling out the windows. Fingers are pointed as officials play the blame game, but in the end the Higher Education Board will have to decide who dropped the hot potato. Laboratories and classrooms have become storage spaces at a university hospital where orders for dizzying amounts of drugs and medical equipment continue to flood the faculty. The Dicle University Hospital in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır has purchased enough drugs to last decades, even centuries and in one case, for the next 4,000 years, the hospital administration said. The purchases came to light after Professor Ayşegül Saraç was appointed as university rector in August and the hospital administration was replaced. The new hospital administration announced the excessive purchases. A search of inventories at the depots uncovered medical supplies that would meet hospital needs for decades. Unfortunately, most of the drugs are passed their use-by-date. Chief Surgeon Sait Alan, speaking to the Anatolia news agency on Tuesday, said they had converted many classrooms and laboratories into depots when stock continued to arrive after he took over. "We asked suppliers not to deliver any more of the orders, telling them we would order in the future as our stocks run out," he said. He said some firms were trying to speed up their deliveries because they also did not have the room to store the stock from the orders. Alan said stocks of some drugs were enough to last them for decades, but that most of them would expire well before that. He said 4,000 boxes of a drug used as an anesthesia in heart operations had been purchased, even though only one was used in 2008. "In other words, we have enough Rapifen for 4,000 years," he said. "Bactrim was used 74 times in 2008 but 2,000 boxes were purchased. We have plastic gloves totaling 2.4 million, 900,000 of which were sterilized gloves, have been purchased. We have canceled an order of another 1 million gloves that had not been delivered because the firm could not keep up with demand," he said. There had been 850,000 bottles of serum purchased, according to Alan. "We have enough Karvezit, a blood pressure medicine, to last 152 years." They made a list of expired drugs and found 14,000 boxes of drugs and 8,500 medical materials would need to be destroyed. "It is hard to calculate the total loss but we can be sure that it will be in the millions," he said. The proper procedure for medical purchases is to work out the previous year’s usage and order 10 percent more or less than that. "That did not happen here. Instead of 100 boxes, 10 times that amount was purchased. Alan said the faculty of medicine had initiated a formal investigation and would file a complaint. The Diyarbakır Prosecutor’s Office announced yesterday they had launched an investigation into the matter. Reporters not allowed in A day after speaking to the Anatolia news agency about the excessive medical purchases, the chief surgeon of the hospital banned reporters attracted to the story from entering the hospital. Doğan news agency reported that the decision was taken in order to prevent members of the hospital's former administration, who he has accused of the purchases, from making a statement in the hospital. Hospital security officials told reporters they could not go in as per the directives of the chief surgeon. Health Minister Recep Akdağ, when asked about the issue, said he trusted the current rector of the university, Professor Saraş, and her colleagues, but added that the ministry had no jurisdiction over university hospitals. "We can conduct investigations but then refer our findings to YÖK (the Higher Education Board), which would decide what to do."