Turkish track and trace system crashes on first day
Some drugs not registered and therefore not recognised
The new drug tracking system (İTS), which came into effect across Turkey earlier this month, crashed on its first day of operation after 24,000 pharmacies tried to access the system simultaneously, according to a report in Today’s Zaman.
The idea of the new system, introduced by the Health Ministry, is that all pharmaceuticals will be tracked from production to consumption, eliminating the need to clip the barcodes of drugs and helping the fight against counterfeit products. Each pharmaceutical has to have a square code and an ID number that will allow the item to be tracked.
Because of the system breakdown, many customers were unable to obtain their medicine; however, pharmacies gave medicines to people they knew by clipping the barcode as they did before the new system was introduced.
In addition to the system overload, another problem was that companies did not submit some drugs to the Health Ministry so that the system would recognize the drugs.
According to the Turkish Pharmacists’ Union (TEB), 70% of medicines were not registered under the scheme. Social Security Institution (SGK) officials said they cannot postpone the implementation of the system and that they have alternative solutions.
‘The system did not work most of the time. And it froze when we tried to register drugs. We don’t know what to do now,’ said an İstanbul pharmacist, Hakan Vural. ‘Medical companies have attached square codes, but once we enter the system, we see that lots of drugs are not registered.’
TEB released a statement saying the system did not work in all the country’s 81 provinces. The system worked on the first day it went into effect, it said, but there have been major problems subsequently caused by the system failure and the lack of information due to medical companies not registering medicines. TEB said it would talk to Labor and Social Security Minister Ömer Dinçer about the issue.