Delese Mimi Darko
The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) has held a stakeholders’ engagement on the draft pharmaceutical traceability guidelines in Accra.
The engagement, which forms part of the National Pharmaceutical Traceability strategy, brought together directors of the Ministry of Health, members of the national technical working group on pharmaceutical traceability, representatives of the Pharmacy Council, Pharmaceutical Society of Ghana, Chamber of Pharmacy, and the Pharmaceuticals Manufacturers Association of Ghana (PMAG).
Pharmaceutical Importers and Wholesalers Association (PIWA), Representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and United States Pharmacopeia (USP) Ghana, Chemonics and the media, also joined to learn from the progress made so far with the draft guidelines in an effort to ensure quality, safe and efficacious medical products for the public.
Addressing the participants, FDA CEO, Delese Mimi Darko, said the track and trace system for medical products enables one to identify any item’s current and past locations in the supply chain.
She indicated that the availability of Substandard and Falsified (SF) medical products on the Ghanaian market endangers the health of the public adding that the FDA in the past years has expended a lot of resources in combating SF medical products in Ghana.
“Despite these efforts, the war on SF medical products is far from over, since the production and trafficking of SF medical products is a multimillion-dollar business.
“The lure of huge profits from this venture has enabled all manner of unscrupulous persons into this business,” she said.
The FDA Boss was optimistic that the implementation of traceability of medical products will enable the Authority to rid the country off and minimise incidence of SF medical products on the Ghanaian market.
She thus noted that a successful implementation of the track and trace system for medical products draft guidelines developed by the FDA, will enable the Authority to have visibility and data on medical products intended for the Ghanaian market by authorised manufacturers; easily track products suspected to be defective along the supply chain and facilitate effective recall of non-conforming products from the market.
It will also enable the FDA to identify legitimate medical products in the supply chain and gather reliable data to inform policy formulation on medical products.
“To surmount the challenges posed by SF medical products, I wish to appeal to all stakeholders present, to support the efforts towards the implementation of track and trace in Ghana to help us rid the market of SF Medical products,” she said.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri