LAHORE (The Thursday Times) — Punjab’s health department has ordered officials to speed up the purchase of a blood cancer drug and restore its free home delivery to patients, after supplies to a provincial treatment programme stopped in June.
Azmat Mahmood, the province’s secretary for specialised healthcare, gave the instructions at an emergency meeting in Lahore attended by the medical superintendents of the programme’s six hospitals and other officials, according to an account of the meeting published on Sunday. He told them to complete the procurement of the drug, nilotinib, as quickly as possible and to deliver it to patients at their homes again.
The programme gives nilotinib and supporting medicines free to patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia, or CML. More than 3,200 registered patients at hospitals in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan, Faisalabad, and Bahawalpur had been receiving them through home delivery, the account said. Mayo Hospital in Lahore, which also served as the supply centre for the other five hospitals, stopped receiving the drug in June, and patients were then advised to seek financial help from Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal to buy it.
Mahmood also told officials to improve treatment facilities for cancer patients and said no negligence would be tolerated.
Months without supply
The gap has left patients buying the drug from private pharmacies, where it has also been hard to find. Earlier this month Punjab Health Minister Khwaja Salman Rafique acknowledged the shortage and said hospitals had been allowed to buy medicines locally while a larger central purchase was completed, after oncologists advised expanding the programme from four medicines to 27.
Nilotinib is a targeted therapy that patients often take for years under specialist care, and doctors warn that long gaps in treatment can be dangerous. Patients who are affected should ask their CML clinic about supplies and should not stop or skip doses without speaking to their doctor. Here is what patients can do while supplies are restored.
