• New Kemsa CEO explains the kind of Kemsa Kenyans expect in the next one year
Image: CHARLENE MALWA
Terry Kiunge spoke to Star health and science reporter Magdaline Saya on the plans she has for the authority. Below are excerpts.
Local manufacturing in the pharmaceutical sector will absolutely have an impact on the pricing of commodities, and not just the pricing but also on the security of the pipeline.
When you talk about the security of the pipeline, what are we saying? We say, for example, we need to buy antimalarials and these antimalarials, we are getting them from a manufacturer in India.
Say, in India, they have also had an increased burden of malaria, are they going to first give us those antimalarials or are they going to use them for their people? Then what happens to our people? So if we have a manufacturer here in Kenya who is manufacturing antimalarials, what we will get when this whole area is developed is that we will have contract manufacturing.
This means we will sit down with manufacturer X, we give them our specifications of what it is that we require, and they manufacture it for us. How does it affect pricing? In August, we have just closed down all the warehouses we had leased and made a saving of Sh200 million that we were paying every year and put all our medicines in our own spaces, so we don’t have to pay others to store medicines.
When you are contract manufacturing, the benefits of cost reduction are even bigger because the manufacturer is likely to be somewhere in Industrial Area, and we are in Industrial Area, so we agree that this is what we need for the year.
Out of these 10,000 pieces you will be bringing us, for example, 2,000 quarter 1, 3,000 quarter 2, so then all I have to then manage and store in terms of inventory is the package that they have brought so then I am not having to incur as so much cost as Kemsa in terms of storage and in terms of securing the medicines.
If there are any lessons we must never forget from Covid in terms of emergency preparedness, it is the importance in investing in our own local capacities. It might be a little bit more expensive to start up, but in the long term, it gives you a lot more benefits, and here we are not even mentioning the opportunities for work, the forex exchange we get to keep here because we are no longer importing.
ONE-YEAR TARGETS
First of all, as the President has said, our work is to make sure the medicines get to every facility in Kenya in good quality as fast as possible and at a good price. That is what Kenyans should expect because we are squarely focused on that one agenda.
There is no patient who should have to suffer because of inefficiencies on our end. So working very hard to get the efficiencies means we are moving the service delivery closer and closer to the expectations of the patient and closer to the achievement of the promise that the President has given Kenyans.
It is also because we want to work very closely with all the stakeholders, be it the ministry, and all the other partners who are involved in this programme activities, and to work with the donors to make sure the security of these medicines' pipeline is always guaranteed.
What makes those empty bottles (ARVs) become empty is that the security of that pipeline is not well managed by the different stakeholders, so we have to work collaboratively with all the other stakeholders involved in making sure that different medicines, be it the ones under programmes, the ones that are being ordered by the counties are available... But having a ruthless focus on what we are delivering continues to be what I spend most of my time doing.
STAFF ON COMPULSORY LEAVE
You know that matter has been litigated for the last one year and the court has made certain orders and we have followed those orders. So the orders that have been made in terms of keeping the staff on their salaries until the judgments come, we have followed those orders. Now, would we desire it to be a different situation? Of course. But the legal process is the legal process, and as an institution, we respect the laws of the land.
But what we like to keep our eyes and focus on is the service delivery because even as we continue to have the matters in court, the patient is not going to wait for us to finish the court processes. Because they are not going to hold back and say they are not going to get sick until we finish what is happening. We still have to find a way to make sure that the functions of the institution continue to do what it is that we have been mandated to do.