Open market prices from the list of essential drugs were on average up to 92% higher compared to the prices of equivalent drugs from the tender contract managed by the Ministry of Health. While, in the open market, no prices have been found for nine products, some of which have high values.
This was announced through a discussion table, in which the Group for Legal and Political Studies (GLPS) presented the Market analysis on the Procurement Process of Essential Medicines in Kosovo.
Berat Abdiu from UBO Consulting, while showing what the report contains, emphasized that the focus of this study is on procurement processes for drugs from the essential list and procurement processes related to health infrastructure.
While he said that 49 medical products were identified from the contracts that were taken for analysis, of which the value of the procurement contracts was over 3 million euros. He added that five of these drugs make up 66 percent of the value of the contract or 2.1 million is spent on only five of these drugs from the general list of 49 products.
Abdiu has emphasized that for these drugs the difference in the market is very large in relation to the price of drugs contracted through the public procurement mechanism from the Ministry of Health.
In this study, a contract for the construction of a primary health care facility in Mamusha was analyzed for comparative cost analysis. The analysis highlights that the contract obtained through procurement is 21% below the reference costs obtained from market research (market prices).
It was also emphasized during the report that significant differences were found between different categories of contracts, such as in the construction sector, hydraulic installations, electrical installations, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and medical gas systems. While the cost analysis reveals that the contract demonstrates a cost advantage, it fails to fully address and highlight that the implementation of the project as a whole has deviated from the contractual terms, thus effectively leaving some work incomplete.
The analyzed contracts were during 2022 and 2023.
