Report reactions to medications — FDA urges public
The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) has urged community pharmacists to move away from the traditional way of only dispensing medications to encourage their patients to report cases of adverse drug reactions.
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According to the Deputy Chief Executive in charge of Drug Registration and Inspectorate Division of the FDA, Mr Seth Seaneke, such feedbacks from users of medicines would enable the FDA to work with manufacturers and suppliers to ensure the safety of drugs on the market.
He made this known at a workshop organised by the FDA to train community pharmacists on ways to encourage monitoring of drug safety.
He said community pharmacists had been chosen for the initiative because their pharmacies were the first port of call by the public as compared to the hospitals.
“As the intermediaries between the public and the FDA, I encourage you to engage patients to enable them to report cases concerning fake and expired drugs or drugs with the same batch number but different manufacturing dates,” he urged.
Reporting
The Head of Vigilance, Safety and Monitoring Department at the FDA, Mrs Adela Ashie, who took participants through what to report on drugs on the market, said the pharmacists should report errors on medical devices, food supplements, cosmetics, household chemical substances and drug abuse.
She urged them to be vigilant to help detect quality defects on drugs, poor packaging, suspected contamination, side effects from vaccines and drug overdose.
Answering questions on how to report such cases to the FDA, Mrs Ashie said a web-based system, known as the SafetyWatch, had been adopted to facilitate reporting.
She said the SafetyWatch System would also help the FDA to fast-track the processing of reported cases sent through the online portal.
She said pharmacists could also visit the FDA website to report such cases.
“We want to improve reporting rate for better patients’ protection, as well as enhance patients’ participation in the management of their disease conditions and better compliance to medication,” she said.
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Collaboration
A Director at the Pharmacy Council, Dr Daniel Amaning Danquah, said achieving the objectives of ensuring the safety of medicines in the country required a collective effort and, therefore, advised the public and relevant stakeholders to support the monitoring of medicine safety.
He said the Pharmacy Council was ready to collaborate with the FDA to see to the realisation of their objective.
