Province 3 government’s failure to allocate budget on time has left health facilities—health posts, primary health care centers and urban health clinics—in Kathmandu without essential medicines.

The lack of budget has also affected health workers’ training and awareness programmes. Because of the government’s failure to allocate budget, health facilities were unable to enforce precautionary measures to combat possible epidemics.

“We got the budget after we were 10 months into the fiscal year,” Krishna Bahadur Chand, chief of Provincial Health Office, in Kathmandu, told the Post. “We were even deprived of salaries for seven months.”

The health office started planning for health programmes—to be launched in Kathmandu district—only after it received the budget in May. After the planning phase was completed, the office called tender to procure essential drugs worth Rs4 million.

“But the process is yet to be completed,” Chand said. “We hope to complete the process in a week.”

But it will take several weeks for the suppliers to supply the medicines, which will mean health facilities won’t be able to distribute the essential drugs to needy patients in the ongoing fiscal year, which will end in another 18 days.

Jagat Nepali, chief of Allapolt Health Post of Kageshwori-Manohara Municipality of Kathmandu, said that the health facility ran out of its stock of essential medicines at the beginning of this fiscal year.

After the country switched to the federal system, and local and provincial governments were elected, the ministry allocated budgets for the different governments to buy essential medicines. However, most of the local units could not procure medicines on time. Some have only just started the process.

“We are being forced to ask patients from impoverished backgrounds to buy essential medicines from private dispensaries,” said Nepali. “Neither the Provincial Health Office nor the local governments have supplied essential medicines.”

Municipality officials say they have started the procurement process to buy the essential medicines.

Similarly, because the budget was allocated so late, the Provincial Health Office is now in a rush to spend the budget for the entire year in two months. To do that, it has been organising training programmes for health workers and local level officials—including elected representatives—to raise awareness about various health programmes.

Local level representatives, however, are not having the time to participate in the training programmes organised by the Provincial Health Office. “Daylong programmes are now being conducted only for two to three hours, as chiefs and deputy chiefs of local governments have not been able to manage time,” said Chand. “Had we received the budget on time we would have been able to make the programmes more effective.”

Likewise, monitoring of private and public health facilities and laboratories operating in the districts, which come under the jurisdiction of Provincial Health Office, could not take place this year due to a lack of budget.

“What can we do when we are not given the budget to run the programmes?” Indira Pandey, a public health inspector serving at the same office, said.