Current Campaigns - Current Campaigns

A ‘stock-out’ is when a pharmacy temporarily has no medicine on the shelf. It may affect one medicine or many medicines, or in the worst case, all medicines. The consequences for patients are grave; they may go without the medicines they need, or seek alternative and sometimes inappropriate medicine. A campaign in five African countries – Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – is underway to combat stock-outs.

Denis Kibira tells more about the campaign in Uganda.

In Uganda, only 45.7 per cent of public facilities had a basket of 28 essential medicines selected for the study. In 2007-2008, the duration of stock-outs in public health facilities averaged 72.9 days per year . Stock-outs can happen for a number of reasons, such as low funding, poor coordination of procurement and distribution, gaps in management and pilferage.

The Stop Stock-Outs campaign is a civil society initiative to advocate for improved availability of, and access to, essential medicines in public health facilities. In Uganda, the campaign was implemented by a consortium of five civil society organisations (CSOs): The Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development in Uganda (HEPS); the Action Group for Health, Human Rights and HIV/AIDS (AGHA); the National Forum of People Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda (NAFOPHANU); Action for Development (ACFODE); and the Alliance for Integrated Development and Empowerment (AIDE).

The campaign aims to lobby, influence and pressure the government to make essential medicines available at all public health institutions, ensure there is sufficient funding, give civil society representation on the board of the National Medical Stores, enhance transparency in medicines supply management, provide a dedicated budget line for essential medicines, and live up to its commitment to spend 15 per cent of the national budget on health care.

The campaign

The campaign, launched in March 2009, has used a variety of approaches. These have included the use of publicity material like t-shirts, banners, fact sheets, fliers and policy briefs. A local artist, Bobi Wine, and a woman member of parliament were approached to champion the cause. The campaign has undertaken various activities including: press statements and conferences, public rallies, radio talk shows and media articles to generate public debate in the media and other fora.

One of the most interesting things we did was to organise something called a Pill Check Week in June 2009. This involved a spot check of medicine stock-out in public health facilities. It was carried out in 11 of the country’s 81 districts. Each of the 11 districts was represented by one government facility. The check covered 10 key essential medicines and highlighted that stock outs, especially of paediatric preparations, were still a major problem in the public health system.

The Pill Check Week took place in all five of the African countries participating in Stop Stockouts and used a Google map to identify where the stock outs were a reality. http://stopstockouts.org/ushahidi/

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