According to the press service of the Prime Minister, Kazakhstan is preparing the Program for medical equipment, where funding sources will be defined for each equipment type and public health care providers who are supposed to get the equipment with priority areas defined until 2025.
The Head of State instructed to centralize procurement of medical equipment on the basis of the existing agency for centralized medicines procurement, called “SK-Pharmacy”.
The Ministry of Healthcare conducted an inventory of medical equipment across public health care organizations in 2021, according to which availability of the needed equipment was 83%, the wear and tear of medical equipment was at 49.6%.
In other words, half of medical equipment in Kazakhstan is worn out.
Currently, the main issues in supply of medical equipment are:
- insufficient amount of equipment and high level of depreciation of the existing fleet of medical equipment;
- high price variability across regions and among providers when purchasing medical equipment locally (in a decentralized fashion);
- lack of mechanisms for leasing medical equipment available to healthcare organizations;
- low domestic production of medical instruments and equioment.
To solve these problems, it is planned to centralize the purchase of medical equipment at State controlled agency, “SK-Pharmacy” LLP in two stages.
In the first stage, the following activities are planned:
- collection applications from local executive bodies until March 1, 2022 on the need for medical equipment;
- change regulations on the purchase of medical equipment;
- unify technical specifications for procurement until the end of April 2022;
- to ensure transparency, improve the information systems of the e-finance center of the Ministry of Finance and automate the collection of applications to request equipment;
- conduct electronic procurement starting from May 2022;
- analyze the need for medical equipment required to get by 2025.
In the second stage, it is planned to study domestic and foreign manufacturers of medical equipment and to consider localization of production, as well as to develop mechanisms for long-term contracts, introduce purchasing mechanisms for life cycle contracts and purchase medical equipment in priority areas on a turnkey basis,” said Minister of Healthcare Azhar Giniyat.
In general, the implementation of the program is aimed at achieving the following results:
- ensure transparency in planning and procurement;
- increase the level of equipment availability;
- reduce the cost of purchased medical equipment due to centralization and consolidation of procurement and the use of unified technical specifications;
- improve the quality of service and staff (user) training;
- increase in the share of domestic producers of medical equipment in Kazakhstan.
Source: zakon.kz; kapital.kz
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