The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7333 p86
22 January 2005

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· The Society (23)
· Overseas pharmacists (2)
· Fellowship (2)
· Diamorphine
· Morphine sulphate
· Chloramphenicol
· Drug donations
· The Journal (2)

Letters to the Editor

Drug donations

Communication is essential

From Miss S. K. Gilmour-White, MRPharmS

In the spring of 2004 I returned from working as a volunteer in the pharmacy of a mission/ government hospital in rural Zambia. I had particular responsibility for assessing its medicines stock control, which was chaotic. Much of the problem was the state of the medicines store, a large building full of unsorted and unlabelled boxes. Among these were seven boxes of donated medicines, which had arrived over the past three years and had remained unopened. Only around 3 per cent of these medicines could be used, because they were in date, had therapeutic value in the hospital setting and, most importantly, were in sufficient quantity to justify the initiation of treatment. A further reason for discarding medicines was because they were from countries where the generic names were not in English. Although I might be able to identify them, their use would have led to difficult if not impossible communication with a number of prescribers. Clearly much time and effort had gone into the collection of these medicines, which were almost exclusively returned patient medicines from hospitals, but they were of limited value.

There was a discussion of this issue in the letters pages of The Journal in 2001, which covered the strong arguments both for and against drug donation and the fundamental issue of reusing returned medicines. However Pamela Bradshaw’s pragmatic stance (PJ, 24 March 2001, p390) concluded that as long as the extreme inequality in medicines availability remains between nations, there will be those who observe a need and try to help — a sentiment with which I agree. However I would emphasise that where donation is considered, the medicines should be a representative and useful quantity of a chosen range of medicines with reasonable expiry dates, rather than small amounts of a large variety. Communication with any national essential medicines programme and the health facility would inform the donor about what would be most useful. This should also ensure that such donations would be expected and appropriately processed, being put to good use rather than ignored and wasted.

Susanna Gilmour-White
London

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