Inspectors needed to check on pharmacies

The HCM City People’s Council has instructed the Department of Health to quickly report how many inspectors it needs and fill the vacancies.

At a workshop held on Tuesday, Tran Thi Ngoc Anh, head of the council’s Committee for Cultural and Social Affairs, called this an important task since monitoring of drugstores is suffering because of a shortage of inspectors.

The department only has a total of 39 inspectors of whom just three specialise in pharmaceutical materials and drugs.

The city has nearly 4,000 drugstores and more than 600 pharmaceutical companies.

Besides, the department does not have a single inspector with expertise in traditional medicine to oversee the 358 stores selling medicinal herbs and nearly 100 production establishments.

Thus, while the existing inspectors are always overworked, the task of finding and penalising violations is not effectively done.

The department has been unable to control drug prices, officials from the Committee for Cultural and Social Affairs complained.

But Pham Khanh Phong Lan, the department’s deputy head, blamed this on a Ministry of Health regulation that allows drugstores to fix retail prices.

Nguyen Van Minh, deputy head of the council’s Committee for Cultural and Social Affairs, who blamed the high drug prices on the involvement of too many layers of middlemen, said the department should also monitor drugstores’ purchases.

So, it has to supplement its personnel soon, he said.

Though the People’s Committee authorised it to recruit enough inspectors a month ago, it has been slow in acting on this, he said.

He wondered why the department does not hire doctors or pharmacists from the city’s two traditional medicine institutes which have many experts.

Lan said her department has been considering recruiting more inspectors and drafting preferential policies for them.

Other issues

Anh said that the department should slap severe penalties on drugstores and pharmaceutical companies that violate regulations.

Lan said her department has sought permission from the ministry to draft its own penal regulations for the city.

It hopes to set up a hotline for residents to complain about drug prices and fakes as required by the People’s Council, she said.

Delegates discussed developing of drugstore chains by drug importers that follow Good Pharmacy Practices (GPP) since this would help eliminate intermediaries who raise drug prices.

Lan said the department would close all drugstores that do not meet GPP standards by next year but assured that the number of drugstores would be adequate to meet demand.

So far 467 pharmacies in the city have received GPP certificates.

Viet Nam News

Tags: Vietnam Pharmaceutical industry