Drugs expiry monitoring and control system

Abstract

Drugs are an essential aspect in Uganda’s health sector. Rarely will any positive diagnostic fail to end up in an affiliated drug prescription. This makes drugs one of Uganda’s major import claiming millions of shillings on the national budget each financial year. As a developing country, Uganda strives to ensure it has all its population healthy and sound to take on the great role in developing the country. To achieve this, a number of government private health facilities have been put in place. Organizations like NMS,JMS are in place to take on the task of distributing drugs to all the health facilities, and to government health facilities in particular by NMS. A Lot of money is spent on buying and distributing drugs within the country. However, the big wastage due to expiry renders all the efforts in vain. This has majorly been attributed to the weaknesses in the drug distribution mechanism and management system. The drug expiry monitoring and control system is developed and designed to reduce the quantity of drugs that expire within Uganda. The developed system is limited to the public sector and hence main users of the system are procurement body-NMS, distribution body-DHO, and dispensing bodyPharmacist at the public health facility. The system has functionalities that aid in this process, that is alerts which notify the available drugs which are expiry soon and reports can be generated to monitor which quantity of drugs need to be redistributed before it expires.