Mr Moses Kamabare
Welcome to NMS General Manager`s Office
WE ARE READY TO DO MUCH MORE NMS General Manager /CEO: Moses Kamabare Medicines availability is a concern of almost everybody in the country rich or poor, young or old, all interface at the point of medicines
The people of Uganda put National Medical Stores in place through an Act of Parliament and gave it a three-fold mandate: to Procure, Warehouse and Distribute Essential Medicines and Medical Supplies, primarily to Government health facilities. We have tried our best to fulfil the aspirations of the framers of the NMS Act of 1993.
This has been achieved by crystallizing the mandate, which is clearly stated in the law, and by also involving our major stakeholders, getting their input whenever we are designing processes that are employed to deliver the mandate. NMS has further crystallized this mandate to focus on major deliverables.
One is to ensure that we stock all the essential medicines and medical supplies that the health facilities have quantified through their procurement plans, against the available budget.
The second deliverable is to ensure that we deliver to these health facilities as indicated in our published Delivery Schedule. The Delivery Schedule is our manifesto to our clients, our social contract with the health facilities in the sense that if they give us their order by the order deadline indicated in this Delivery Schedule, NMS undertakes to deliver to them the medicines and medical supplies by the delivery deadline that is stated in it.
This has increased transparency in our service to the health facilities and has also made monitoring of this service easy for everybody, both in the health sector and also among other stakeholders.
Medicines availability is a concern of almost everybody in the country rich or poor, young or old, all interface at the point of medicines. The feedback from every concerned stakeholder is valuable to NMS, as we continually devise means of improving our service to them.
NMS has had a number of innovations over time, and they have been responsible for its success: we are always listening to the people, always analysing our challenges and innovating to respond to them. We believe that so far we have succeeded to a good extent.
About 10 years ago, we had availability of medicines in Government health facilities (independently accessed by MOH and partners) -which is a critical indicator- at a paltry 21% in the 2009/2010 FY. A few years down the road we are now seeing the availability at more than 85% in the 2017/2018 FY, and we are convinced we can improve on that.
Indeed, for the future, we look forward to having a bigger capacity to fulfill our mission and mandate. We believe our new warehouse shall be completed by the end of this financial year (2018/19). With its bigger capacity, the warehouse shall accommodate everything that our health facilities will need for a number of years ahead. We continue to further build the capacity of our staff, and enable them to better appreciate the needs of the people that we serve, rallying them to better deliver on our mandate.
Automating all our processes is another initiative in the offing. Currently, a number of our processes, especially the way we receive and process orders from the over 3000.Medicines availability is a concern of almost everybody in the country rich or poor, young or old, all interface at the point of medicines facilities we serve, will soon be automated, so that from the comfort of the health facility the health worker can place an order and we receive it in seconds.
Visibility and transparency will not be the only benefits to this, but major stakeholders will be able to interface with NMS instantly and get the information they need. There are even more radical initiatives planned: should the laws be amended and the resources provided, we will also venture into serving more than government health facilities.
The capacity we have built is to the point that we can do so much more, and there are a number of private sector gaps that we feel we can better serve. We thus know we can extend service gaps beyond vaccines. We believe we can leverage that, and generate resources that would further reduce funding gaps for medicines in public health facilities. In the meantime, we shall continue to increase medicine availability, and indeed intend to raise it to about 90%.
I thank you