Leader of the Opposition Pinarayi Vijayan has yet again flagged the issue of acute shortage of medicines in government hospitals, pointing to an audio message attributed to the Director of Health Services (DHS), which was reportedly circulated in one of the official groups in the Health department, as an evidence of the crisis.
In a Facebook post on Monday, Mr. Vijayan pointed to the voice message of the DHS which was circulated in a group of district medical officers and district programme managers, which acknowledged the medicine shortage and urged hospital superintendents to make emergency local purchases of medicine using hospital development society funds so that a crisis is averted.
Mr. Vijayan said that patients coming to public hospitals had been complaining of the non-availability of medicines and the fact had been reported widely by the media too. However, instead of taking urgent measures to resolve the situation, the government has chosen to deny that there is a shortage at all.
He claimed that the DHS’s voice message is the official acknowledgement of the government’s total failure to procure and distribute medicines to public hospitals through Kerala Medical Services Corporation Ltd.
He alleged that instead of taking proactive measures to resolve the crisis, the government’s reaction is to try and prevent any information about the actual situation from leaking out.
Published – September 28, 2026 09:20 pm IST
