Findings by The Guardian across major public hospitals have shown supply shortages in drug dispensaries that had earlier offered succour to patients, in terms of availability, affordability, and integrity of the products.
According to one of the patients, Favour Afolabi, a middle-aged woman, said, “I brought my father to the hospital. After waiting for over one hour, we saw the doctor, who gave us this prescription. He told us that he was not certain the pharmacy inside the hospital would have them and that we should go outside to purchase them.
The cost of drugs in Oyo, including the University Teaching Hospital , Ibadan, is also out of the reach of many residents. A recent check showed that prices of drugs had increased by as much as 400 per cent. In Rivers State, the narrative is slightly different. Not only is there scarcity at public hospitals, the government-owned dispensaries are a lot more expensive than private-owned.
The narrative is not any better in Lagos, though the hike in cost is most profound. Gloria, an asthmatic patient, and a student at the University of Lagos visited a pharmacy as usual to purchase four pieces of Ventolin inhalers at N4,000 each. But a canister had increased to N17,000 lately. She noted that Nigeria presently does not have the technology for API production and the prices of APIs abroad have doubled.
Okotie said: “One of the major reasons some of the drugs also went that high, is the issue of scarcity, some of the drugs were out of circulation. The producers of these medicines left our shores. So, that gave room to the market forces because it is not centrally controlled.