The waiting line to access specialized component medicines (medicines, in general, expensive and long-term use) is 25 thousand processes, in Minas Gerais. The information was presented by the representative of the Department of Health (SES), Grazielle Dias da Silva, at a public hearing on the difficulties in accessing medicines for transplanted people.
At the meeting, held this Wednesday (24/4/24) by the Health Commission of the Legislative Assembly of Minas Gerais (ALMG), the problems were attributed by the guest to the lack of staff to analyze the documents. Other guests, however, pointed out that a year ago the state government increased bureaucracy for requestswhich has disrupted the flow.
The medicines for transplanted people are called “immunosuppressants”, medicines whose main The objective is to avoid rejection of organs received. They need to be taken throughout life after surgery, and stopping treatment or reducing the recommended dosage can cause organ loss and have fatal results.
As the representative of Santa Casa de Belo Horizonte, Pedro Augusto de Souza, argued, access to medicines should be as less bureaucratic as possible. According to him, a year ago, the transplant patient gathered the documents, presented them at Farmácia Minas and left there with the medicines.
Now, a step has been taken on this path, with the documents first being analyzed at the secretariat and then taken to Farmácia Minas.
“The State has already distributed the organ to that patient, it has already registered the surgery, what is there so much to analyze in this documentation? Missing a dose is the beginning of organ rejection.” Pedro Augusto Macedo de Souza Nephrologist at Santa Casa de BH
Some people who have already had transplants and depend on medications were also present and raised the same problem. In addition to the additional step in the analysis delaying the delivery of medicines, it causes problems, because it often requires people to travel to other municipalities, as there are no stations to receive documents in all cities.
According to prosecutor Luciano Moreira de Oliveira, coordinator of the Operational Support Center for Public Prosecutor’s Offices for the Defense of Health (CAO-Saúde), the body has received many demands about the delay of these medicineswhich come to take more than four months to be delivered. He stated that there are also demands regarding lack of some medicines.
The bureaucracy for releasing medicines through the Farmácia de Minas program was criticized by participants in the Health Commission hearingTV Assembly
Secretariat alleges problem of lack of staff to analyze processes
Regarding the lack of medicines, Grazielle da Silva, from SES, indicated that there was a delay of a month in the delivery, by the Ministry of Health, of a medicine widely used by transplanted people. The situation, however, would have already been resolved.
Regarding the delay, she indicated that the secretariat adopted a decentralized strategy for receiving requests in recent years, which increased demand, but the number of servers to meet it was not expanded.
In this sense, she explained that, currently, 14 servers are dedicated exclusively to analyzing these requests, with an average production of 35 daily processes. Around 12 thousand requests are received monthly, of which 10 thousand are resolved. As a result, 25 thousand cases are backlogged. To solve the problem, the secretariat would be working to increase the number of people working with the analyses.
One of the steps was to change the understanding that only permanent employees could act in these processes, which would be final for the secretariat. With the change, workers outsourced via MGS started working in the area last month. In addition, an internal selection was carried out at the secretariat, recruiting employees working in other areas, to analyze these processes at least once a week.
The limitation is that they necessarily need to be health professionals, registered with a professional council. Another problem, according to the SES representative, is that the State Secretariat for Planning and Management (Seplag) has not authorized the payment of overtime to employees, preventing the extension of their working hours to reduce the waiting list.
Other actions would be in the planning process at the secretariat. One of them is the reevaluation of the list of medicines in the special component, in order to include some in the basic components. This way, access to these medicines would be faster.
Representative Arlen Santiago (Avante), author of the request that gave rise to the meeting, indicated that he will pressure Seplag to release overtime payments to employees on an emergency basis.
Deputy Doctor Paulo (Patriota), in turn, said that it is also necessary to talk about the emergency hiring of labor to analyze the processes.
Deputy Doctor Wilson Batista (PSD) agreed with his colleagues on the need for emergency actions.
Uberaba Regional Hospital suffers from few resources
A part of this morning’s meeting (24) was given to representatives from the Municipality of Uberaba (Triângulo Mineiro) to present their demands regarding the health area. The municipality’s health secretary, Valdilene Rocha, and councilor Luiz Carlos Donizete da Silva were present. They demanded, in particular, an increase in the transfer of resources to the José de Alencar Regional Hospital based in Uberaba.
According to the guests, the institution serves 27 municipalities, where 800 thousand people live. All medium and high complexity cases are sent to the regional hospital, which, according to Valdilene Rocha, requires R$7 million per month for proper functioning. Of this amount, Uberaba currently contributes R$4.5 million.
The secretary asked for the commission’s support in demanding an increase in funding from the State and the Union. Representative Arlen Santiago committed to pushing for an increase in resources.
Source: ALMG
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Tags: Requests special medicines queue thousand processes Minas
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