Staff of Food and Drugs Authority undergo training
A Five-day capacity building programme on handling consumer complaints and conducting investigations organised for staff of the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) has ended in Accra.
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The programme was aimed at enhancing the capacity of the FDA in an effort to scale up supervision of foods and drugs produced in the country or imported. It was held under the European Union (EU) Trade-Related Assistance & Quality Enabling Programme (TRAQUE) estimated at 15 million euros in value.
The capacity building programme will continue for a period of two years and is expected to equip about 300 staff members of the FDA with adequate supervisory and monitoring skills.
Forty-eight participants, drawn from the offices of the FDA nationwide, have so far attended the second segment of the five-day workshop. They studied procedures on ways to investigate and report appropriately.
At the close of the programme, the Senior Regulatory Officer at the FDA, Mr Kwame Dei Asamoah-Okyere, said the programme also had the objective of producing guidelines for tackling consumer complaints and for conducting investigations on market surveillance activities.
Moreover, he said, the programme was to further provide the FDA with techniques on ways of managing its web content in order to bring it up-to-date and get the system interconnected
Monitoring
As part of its sponsorship package, the EU presented 50 Ipad tablets to the monitoring department of the FDA for the purposes of assisting officials to get online to effectively conduct site inspection of products during field checks.
“The tablets would aid our officers conduct web content analysis of products on the field before they undergo testing. This would ensure that whatever they will be testing is efficacious and conforms to the required local and international standards,” Mr Asamoah-Okyere pointed out.
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The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the FDA, Mr Hudu Mogtari, in his address, tasked the participants to not compromise on food quality.
According to him, while the authority periodically organised market surveillance to detect substandard, spurious, falsely labelled, falsified and counterfeit products, staff nonetheless needed to be vigilant in their operations.
“Issues of porous borders had remained a major difficulty in the blockage of fake products. Under the circumstances, the authority spends hugely on post-market surveillance activities in recalling such products,” he said.
He said while the training programme would strengthen the capacity of the FDA, it was necessary for staff to remain committed to the core values the authority stood for in their quest to protect society.
Writer’s email: delarussel@gmail.com