A shortage of basic surgical supplies, including crepe bandages, at the Colombo National Hospital and other large state hospitals has left patients being asked to buy items needed for their own treatment from outside pharmacies, the Daily Mirror reported on Wednesday evening.

Dr. Chamal Sanjeewa, President of the Government Medical Officers’ Forum (GMOF), said patients needing wound dressing, post-operative wound coverage and orthopaedic support were facing difficulties because the required bandages were not available.

Where the shortage comes from

Dr. Sanjeewa attributed the gap to delays in the procurement process of the Medical Supplies Division. He said a fallback mechanism exists — hospital directors are permitted to buy certain essential items locally from approved pharmacies — but that it “had not been functioning effectively in some hospitals.”

That is the operative complaint. The shortage is not being described as an absence of stock nationally so much as a failure of the two systems meant to prevent it: central procurement, and the local-purchase route that is supposed to cover central procurement’s gaps.

The burden falls unevenly. Dr. Sanjeewa said the situation was hardest on patients without a caregiver who can leave the ward to buy supplies, and questioned how patients admitted for hospital-based treatment could be expected to source basic surgical items from outside when those items form part of their care.

A warning about next year

The GMOF President’s second point is forward-looking, and is arguably the more serious of the two. He said procurement for the 2027 health sector has stalled, and warned that prolonged delays could reproduce the shortages of medicines and medical equipment seen in recent years.

He called on the Health Minister to intervene immediately to address weaknesses in procurement and distribution, and said the wider health-sector crisis that emerged in 2022 has not been fully resolved — raising the question of whether the system is prepared to prevent another disruption in essential supplies.

Context

The complaint lands on an established pattern rather than in isolation. State hospitals ran short of the cancer drug filgrastim in August, prompting an airlift and questions in Parliament and then an emergency order for 160,000 vials. Apeksha Hospital had run short of the same drug days earlier, and doctors’ unions warned that scarcity was feeding a black market. Separately, a batch of state-supplied medicines failed quality tests this year.

Those cases involved high-cost specialist drugs. Crepe bandages are among the cheapest and most routine consumables a hospital buys, which is what makes their absence a different kind of signal.

Not reported

The Daily Mirror does not say how long the shortage has lasted, which other hospitals are affected beyond the reference to “other major hospitals,” or what quantity of stock is outstanding. It gives no figure for how many patients have been asked to buy their own supplies, and no indication of what the items cost a patient at retail.

It carries no response from the Medical Supplies Division, the Ministry of Health or the National Hospital’s administration, and does not say whether the Health Minister has been asked to respond. It does not say what specifically has stalled in the 2027 procurement cycle, at what stage, or what the normal timetable would be.

No other verified newsroom had filed on the shortage at the time of writing. NewsFirst’s and Hiru’s listings carried nothing on it, and a search across Island, Daily FT, EconomyNext, Daily News, Colombo Gazette and news.lk returned no same-day report, so this account rests on a single source.