Pharmaceutical Management: Our Impact

The KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Provincial Pharmaceutical Supply Depot (PPSD) procures and supplies pharmaceuticals to approximately 550 health facilities in the South African province. In July 2013, it took the PPSD an average of 27 days to process and prepare for dispatch a health facility’s main order for medicine. The PPSD was therefore faced with a pressing question: How can we reduce the time to complete a facility’s main order?

Curbing the spread of tuberculosis (TB) requires that patients have uninterrupted access to a full course of treatment—frequently a difficult task in developing country settings considering that each regimen includes multiple medicines taken over the span of several months. These may need to be customized based on the type of TB being treated and the patient’s reaction to the prescribed combination. The emergence of multidrug-resistant TB (MDRTB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDRTB) further complicates the management of TB medicines.

Twenty-five staff from key pharmaceutical regulation stakeholders in Afghanistan completed a comprehensive training in March and April 2015 on the Global Pharma Health Fund’s GPHF-Minilab™ and its use. The GPHF-Minilab is a portable mobile mini-laboratory kit designed for rapid medicine-quality verification and counterfeit medicine detection in resource-limited environments.

As a pharmacist with the Bariadi Council Health Management Team in Tanzania’s Lake Zone, Vincent Nanai is responsible for ensuring that all 23 public health facilities supported by the council are stocked with essential commodities. However, prior to Nanai’s training from the US Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Tibu Homa project, many public health facilities within the Lake Zone frequently ran out of medicines and supplies.