No free drugs under rural health mission

New Delhi: Jan 02, 2010

No State provides free medicines to below the poverty line (BPL) patients under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). “The insufficiency of drugs and thereby the imperative of prescribing medicines from outside continue widely. This could also be linked to insufficiency of understanding of the essential drug concept,” says the third report of the Common Review Mission (CRM) on the NRHM. The CRM points out while most States seem sensitive to the issue of availability of drug especially for BPL patients, irrational prescribing higher order medicines, instead of basic generic preparations, has been reported.

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