‘Medicine prescription work to be streamlined’

KUWAIT CITY, Jan 24: Minister of Health, Dr. Khaled Al-Saeed, has issued 3 ministerial decisions to regulate registration, and distribution of medical devices, supplies and health products, and to streamline medicine prescription work in the public and private sectors, reports Al-Rai daily. Assistant Undersecretary for Drug and Food Control Affairs, Dr. Abdullah Al-Badr, said the new ministerial decision is in line with international regulations and standards including biomedical devices, calling it a qualitative move in the field of regulation and control of medical devices in Kuwait. The decision, he said, places medical devices into four categories in terms of their use and impact on their users, so that regulatory conditions, studies and requirements for registration are commensurate with the category to which the medical device is subjected to.

Control
He pointed out the second ministerial decision regarding the regulation and circulation of health products comes to keep pace with the continuous developments followed by international control systems and includes the conditions and procedures to be followed for registering health products and the companies producing them and the mechanism to control them. He pointed out that health products are pharmaceuticals that are used to preserve human health or help diagnose, prevent, or contribute to the treatment of some lowrisk conditions, or to compensate for the deficiencies in some physiological functions in the human body.

On the other hand, Dr. Al-Badr clarified that the decision to regulate the medical prescription also specified the information that must be available in the prescription and the exceptional cases in which the exchange is allowed through the trade name instead of the scientific name, as well as the role and responsibility of the clinical pharmacist specialized in his field. He stressed that writing treatment with the scientific name aims to achieve several advantages, among which the most prominent of which is the patient’s right to know the scientific name and the available alternatives, as well as reducing the occurrence of medication errors, as the scientific name is the original and known to health practitioners, while the trade names are many and are increasing continuously and it may be difficult to be familiar with all of them.