The health department of Kerala has taken a host of steps to strengthen the drug regulatory system in the state by introducing high tech facilities which will help implement e-governance application and instant tracking of spurious/sub-standard drugs, besides bringing all doctors, pharmacists, nurses and all other stakeholders under one umbrella, said Kerala health minister Adoor Prakash.

As part of the strengthening schemes, every field officer will be given laptops with internet data card in order to communicate with each other and the head office on daily basis. Further, government will establish office of Assistant Drugs Controller in every district for improving the services. Currently, the law enforcement in all the districts is carried out with a network of six zonal offices.

The minister said his department also plans to set up three more drug testing laboratories during the next five year plan for a big leap in quality control activities. Testing and analysis of samples are now done at the DTL in Thiruvananthapuram which has the capacity to analyse 4000 samples. Development of a second regional DTL in Kochi is on the anvil, which will have a capacity to test 4000 samples. These developments are in addition to the Community Pharmacies (Karunya) being launched in various parts of the state to sell all the drugs at 20 to 60 per cent discounts, the minister said.

Later speaking to Pharmabiz, the state drugs controller, S Satheesh Kumar said that the department will publish SOP for each activity right from sampling, inspection, licensing, prosecution etc. for unification of activities across the state and the details of which will be posted in the official website, so that any stakeholder can approach the higher officials for any deficiency/deviation of services.

He said at present the report of inspection from a subordinate officer reaches the headquarters after a long period. Reports on inspections on trade are not reaching the head office at Thiruvananthapuram, so the department is unable to take effective monitoring of the quality and quantity of the output of each officer. The new high tech facilities will solve all these problems, he hoped.

Three years ago the department, under his initiative, conducted Training Need Analysis (TNA) and identified the weak areas. Following that, intensive training on computer education, prosecution, IPC, Cr PC, investigation skills, GLP etc. was given to all the officers. More than 95 per cent of the staff was given training to improve their skill. Induction training extending a period of 6 months was given to each new officer in various aspects of the regulation and quality control, Satheesh Kumar told Pharmabiz.

Further, the drugs controller said the department has made agreement with NIC Thiruvananthapuram and Ahmedabad to launch the time tested XLN Software system at the department with which the licensing system can be automated with a central server. This will enable the government to monitor every detail of the file movement, sampling and analysis of drugs directly.

SMS alerts on NSQ/banned drugs will be sent to each stakeholder and to the public who register their names with the official website. All the doctors, pharmacists and nurses working in the government and private hospitals will be asked to register with the website. He expressed the hope that this SMS system will help check the movement of any substandard or spurious drugs in the state even though they were purchased already by a hospital or customer.