ISLAMABAD: Federal Government Poly Clinic (FGPC) has introduced a new barcoding system to control theft of medicines from the hospital’s medical stores and dispensary. According to an official, the new mechanism evolved to avoid misuse and theft of medicines and 12 security cameras have also been installed at medical stores and dispensaries. He said that these security cameras will remain functional round the clock to stop medicine theft and ensure that medicines are being issued only to the relevant patients. He believed that now all incoming and outgoing medicines would be barcoded to know who is being given the medicine. He added on the direction of Executive Director FGPC Raja Amjad Mehmood that all medical stores of the hospital have now been fully computerised and medicines would be treated with barcoding. The official said that the step was taken to control incidents of medicine theft which damaged the national exchequer and under the new system all incoming and outgoing medicines would be registered first at the medical stores. He believed that reduction in the use of medicines was also observed at some hospital dispensaries in the federal capital due to steps of present ED of the hospital and that the renovation work including refurbishing of medical stores and installation of security and computer system has been completed with the support of donors. He said that an amount of Rs 1.5 million has been spent on upgrading the medical stores while dispensaries have also been upgraded with addition of four new counters to facilitate the patients. He also said that certain cases of drugs stealing did occur in the past at the hospital pharmacy but now it has been addressed and anyone doing so would be caught red-handed. “Barcoding is the most common form of automatic identification used in automatic data-capture technologies and barcodes track virtually everything but most effective in medicines’ record,” the official said.