Ministry to identified officials involved in administering expired drugs to patients

The minister replied that Kanifing and Bansang were the only ones flagged in the audit, but he promised to pursue the matter further to identify officials involved.

The matter came to light after Hon. Omar Jammeh, member for Janjangbureh, raised questions on the 2020 FPAC audit report adopted by plenary in July 2025. The report revealed that during an inspection, expired medicines listed in the Central Medical Store’s registers were not properly destroyed, some were never presented to auditors, and most worryingly certain expired drugs were still issued to patients.

Minister Samateh did not shy away from the issue. “To the best of my knowledge, there were indeed some items that had gone beyond their shelf life, and auditors found they were used,” he admitted. He named Kanifing General Hospital and Bansang General Hospital as the facilities where lapses were recorded.

But Samateh stressed the quantities were small and insisted the matter had been contained. “They were not huge quantities. It is not a widespread phenomenon. These were isolated cases,” he said.

Hon. Jammeh pressed the minister on what actions had been taken against those responsible. 

He answered: “To the best of my knowledge, they were reprimanded, but they were equally educated on the potential danger of administering such medications.”

He was further asked whether reprimands were enough when public safety was at stake.

Dr. Samateh stated: “Typically, when a drug is expired, it is recommended it is not used. The line is drawn,” he told MPs. But he added that some medical literature debated whether a medicine expiring today might still be effective tomorrow. “For the safe side, in The Gambia, we stop using it once it reaches the expiry date,” he said firmly.

Despite these explanations, Hon. Jammeh pressed whether the expired drugs were common prescriptions widely used by Gambians. Samateh replied that the items were “not frequently used” and insisted that mechanisms had since been put in place to prevent a recurrence.

He detailed procedures requiring expired drugs to be removed from shelves three months before expiry, stored separately, and destroyed under the supervision of the Medicines Control Agency (MCA) and the National Environment Agency (NEA). “Expired pharmaceuticals are to be neither issued nor dispensed to patients,” he reiterated.