Cheap drugs purchase

In the early 1960s, when Enoch Powell was Minister of Health in Macmillan s Conservative government, the DoH bought large quantities of tetracycline from Poland for NHS hospital use. This was found to be clinically ineffective and of substandard quality a public outcry in the medical press followed. The cheap drugs exercise was not repeated, but bulk hospital purchase at competitive contract prices continues, and this leads to wide discrepancies between the hospital price and the price charged to prescriptions written in the primary healthcare sector. 

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