Kuigram General Hospital is struggling to manage essential Dextrose and Sodium Chloride saline, used for short term fluid replacement, due to severe shortage in supply for the past one month.
The district is experiencing an acute shortage of saline.
As the government-run hospitals can’t supply the saline as per demand, patients and their relatives are bound to buy the saline paying double to triple price from rare pharmacies.
Before hiking the price, a 1000ml DNS saline was sold for Tk 90-95 but now it is being sold for Tk 250-300.
According to sources, over 200 patients get hospitalised at the 250-bed General Hospital daily and around 400 patients remain undergoing treatment with different problems.
Around 200 bags of saline supplied by the state-owned medicine manufacturing Essentials Drugs Company Ltd is needed to cope with the demand.
But, the saline supply from the EDCL remains suspended for the past few months, resulting in a disruption of providing saline to the patients.
Md Yunus Ali, who took his son with fever and stomach ache to the hospital on Friday morning, said that he was asked to manage the DNS saline from outside the hospital and was finally able to buy a bag of saline for Tk 200 against its usual price of Tk 90-95 after searching several pharmacies.
Druggist Md Emdadul Hoque of Gariyalpara Mor said that there was no supply of DNS saline and they had nothing to do once the companies (medicine manufactures) did not supply as per their demand.
Quoting the medicine suppliers, he said that the production of the saline was being hampered due to the dollar crisis as raw materials for the saline were to be imported from abroad in exchange for dollars.
Civil surgeon Dr Md Majur-A-Morshed said that they informed the higher authority about the crisis considering the situation.
