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In an attempt to appease generic medicine producers, the Ministry of Health said on Monday that it would send circulars to government hospitals and pharmacies requiring them to make available cheaper generic medicines.

“I have issued a decree obligating all government hospitals to provide generic medicines for patients, but some doctors might not know that they should offer the patients the option to use the generic medicines or the patented ones,” Health Minister Endang Rahayu Sedyaningsih said.

Endang’s statement comes nearly a month after Health Ministry officials said that generic medicine prices were being raised to keep lifesaving drugs from disappearing from pharmacy shelves.

Endang said that to increase the use of generic medicines, the ministry had taken a number of steps, including rationalizing the prices of the medicines and subsidizing the distribution fees.

She said the ministry had also asked the Indonesian Doctors Association (IDI) to ask its members to provide patients with the option to use generic medicines.

“Some hospitals have claimed they didn’t offer the generic medicines because the drugs that the patients were taking did not have a generic version, and some pharmacies have claimed they didn’t offer the generic medicines because the doctors didn’t mention it in their prescriptions,” Endang said.

Akmal Taher, the director of Jakarta’s Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital, said the hospital had reminded its satellite pharmacies to offer patients the choice between generic and patented medicines.

He said that in the next three months the hospital would begin an intensive campaign to remind its doctors about the use of generic medicines. After the campaign, any doctor who didn’t offer the generic option to patients would incur a sanction ranging from a simple warning to harsher punishments, Akmal said, without elaborating.

“It’s not that simple, there are so many levels that we need to go through to promote the use of generic medicines,” he said.

Zaenal Abidin, secretary general of the IDI, said: “The most important thing is that the government should be able to guarantee the continuity of generic medicine supplies.”

Sri Indrawati, the director general of pharmaceuticals and medical equipment at the ministry, said last month that more than 80 types of generic medicines were not available on the market in 2009 because the producers thought the prices set by the government were too low.