Persons seeking health care in health facilities across the country will no longer have to struggle to get the needed drugs they need, or even so, at an easy and affordable price.

This is because the Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG) has established a platform that will ensure medicines for every illness is available for patients in the country.

According to the Executive Director of the Association, Dr Maxwell Antwi “an estimated 30 per cent of medicines in Ghana are fake or substandard, leading to treatment failures, negative side effects, anti-microbial resistance, spread of diseases and unnecessary deaths.”

Launching the supply chain system, Dr Antwi bemoaned how the data on fake medicines in Ghana is overwhelming.

He cited a European Union report which revealed Ghana was ranked 6th on the league of countries with the highest burden of fake medicines.

Expanding on the EU report, Dr Antwi mentioned that Ghana’s medicine market faces multiple complex challenges, including ineffective inventory and management, forecasting, fragmented value chain and delays in payment to suppliers.

Obviously, this would result in frequent stock-outs, poor quality and high prices of medicines compared to the international reference prices.

All these have lingered for years because there has been according to home “lack of proper quality control through post-market surveillance.”

But Med4All is set to correct this unfavourable trend through its special financial assistance scheme for members of CHAG.

President of the CHAG platform in African, Dr Peter Yeboah, outlines how the platform, funded by healthcare advocates, PharmAccess Foundation, will work.

“When a CHAG Health facility needs some medication but cannot them, the Med4All platform will procure those drugs for the facility, and at affordable prices as well as in a speedy manner,” the facility is required to pays later.

This led Dr Yeboah to urge the manager of the beneficiary health facilities not to renege in payment as doing so will cripple the platform.