Government to fix abuse of CDAP

The Minister of Health told reporters on Thursday the Chronic Disease Assistance Programme (CDAP) is being abused. And he said Cabinet has approved the appointment of a special steering committee to fix the problem.

Dr Fuad Khan made the statements at the post-Cabinet news conference at the Office of the Prime Minister. Khan aid an evaluation of the CDAP showed major leakages and duplication of pharmaceuticals.

He added that there needs to be accountability between pharmacies, medical personnel and patients. He added that there are plans to hand each patient a smart card to help streamline the system.

The minister noted that CDAP cost more than $400 million a year for about 600,000 prescriptions.

Khan said a monitoring system is necessary to check the CDAP pharmacies to see what and how much of the items were prescribed and how they were delivered. He said investigations have shown that there many medications are out of stock. He explained why it happens. "The majority...occurred as a result of duplication of one patient receiving the drugs more than one time per month when they were supposed to get one item per month," he said.