NAROWAL, Jan 23: Medicines worth more than one million rupees of National Programme for Health meant for poor and needy patients at government hospitals have expired.

The scam emerged here on Friday when the officials of the district health department tried to dispose of the medicines to hide their negligence and inefficiency.

District Coordination Officer (DCO) Waqas Ali Mahmood got reports that medicines had gone expired laying unused in the store rooms of the district health department.

The DCO appointed District Officer (coordination) Malik Ziaullah and District Monitoring Officer Farooq Akmal to inspect the stores situated at Manak Basic Health Unit (BHU) and Rural Health Center in Shah Gharib to verify the reports.

Both officials when visited Shah Gharib on Friday, they found a cache of expired medicines was being loaded on the district health department vehicles under the supervision of Deputy District Officer (health) Muhammad Hafeez and District Health Officer Javaid Sindhu to shift them somewhere else without making their entries in record.

The officials seized the medicines. It is also learnt that a big quantity of expired medicines have also been removed from the Manak BHU and Malikpur BHU without entries in the record.

The officials of the district health department tried to deliver some expired medicines to lady health visitors and lady health workers with instructions to waste the medicines after making false entries in the record regarding the distribution of the expired medicines but many of them refused to receive the expired medicines.

DCO Waqas Ali Mahmood took a note of the waste of medicines and directed the EDO (health) to submit a report over the incident.