1 pharmacist for over 1,500 patients at Kozhikode Medical College Hospital

Sources say the waiting time will increase during peak days as the government has not created even a single new post of the pharmacist at the MCH.

The senior most positions in this department remain vacant, and the pharmacists who are supposed to be in the pharmacy are now forced to do the work of a store superintendent and a senior officer.

At present there are only 28 pharmacist posts here and, on an average, 7,000 patients seek treatment in the outpatient department.

The casualty cases and inpatients included, the number goes well above 10,000 a day and a pharmacist at the OP pharmacy caters to more than 1,500 patients.

Pharmacists themselves admit that the patients are at grave risk as the time that a pharmacist gets to spend with a patient is hardly a minute while the ideal time should be about five minutes.

So they could not explain the details of medication and the way they were supposed to take each tablet.

“This is an entirely neglected area,” Murali Mohan, state committee member of Kerala Government Pharmacists Association, told DC.

“When they introduced the ward pharmacy concept, the idea was to develop it as full-fledged units. However, among 43 words we have at MCH, only nine have ward pharmacies at present and all of them remain on the way they were started, without any improvement. The super-specialty block has no pharmacists and personnel from the already short staffed Medical College are asked to take care of them.”

He says the number of departments and medicines had grown manifold, but no additional posts have been created.

“We are doing our best and try to describe as much as we could to patients. But we do not get time, and we are not sure whether that was sufficient for the patient. Moreover, the patient has to wait a minimum of 45 minutes near the pharmacy because of the staff shortage, and they will be impatient to listen to us,” he said.

Principal Dr P. V. Narayanan also admitted that there were problems due to the shortage of pharmacists.

“Apart from giving medicines, they also have to do training of pharma trainees and keeping the stock entry. No additional posts have been created in tune with the increase in patients,” he said.