By Haja Adama Kamara.
The Managing Director of the National Medical Supplies Agency (NMSA), Dr. Lawrence Sandi has schooled Journalists on the role and responsibilities of NMSA in the procurement and distribution of drugs and medical supplies for all Government institutions in Sierra Leone.
According to Dr. Lawrence Sandi, the NMSA agencyโs main focus is to work with free health care initiative, as well as programs of HIV/ AIDS, Malaria control programs and commodities management. Dr .Sandi furthered that, the responsibility to manage the COVID-19 medical supplies and commodities has been added to the role of the agency.
He assured the availability of NMSA to address urgent cases that are reported in the various free health care centres. He added that a lot of efforts have been made by Government to bring out commodities, especially when there are global challenges like that of Ebola and the COVID-19.
Dr. Sandi concluded that as an Agency they never have problems with remittance of funds from the Ministry of Finance to procure drugs, a reason which is why the stores are always full, lasting up to a year to supply all service delivery points.
The Deputy MD, Dr. Moses Batema in his statement disclosed that their operations are divided into three faces including the procurement and receiving of the goods into the warehouse, to store the products into the warehouse and how the products are dispatched from the warehouse to the service delivery points. He added that distribution is done four times a year. He added that the drugs are loaded on to trucks and convoyed to different districts for criminals not to take toy with them.
He said their products come directly from UNICEF and the ones brought in by the Government are also delivered to the warehouse as bulk package. In conclusion, the Deputy MD said they that have a total of nine warehouses and that the central store serves as the biggest hub. โWe also have three warehouses that give us four thousand five hundred square meters of storage capacity”, he stated.
