04 April 2012

Good Health Adds Life to Years - World Health Day 2012

Every year, World Health Day is celebrated on 7 April to mark the anniversary of the founding of WHO in 1948. Each year a theme is selected for World Health Day that highlights a priority area of concern for WHO.

The topic of World Health Day in 2012 is Ageing and health with the theme "Good health adds life to years". The focus is how good health throughout life can help older men and women lead full and productive lives and be a resource for their families and communities. Ageing concerns each and every one of us – whether young or old, male or female, rich or poor – no matter where we live.

WHO has prepared an extensive Global brief for World Health Day 2012 which takes a fresh look at health data on ageing to help us better understand the needs of older people. Sections include key points, the demographics of ageing and the epidemiology of population ageing. The document also outlines four key actions that governments and societies can take now for healthier and more active ageing.

Click here to visit the WHO pages on World Health Day 2012.

FIP supports and encourages all activities that promote healthy aging and urges all Member Organisations to implement initiatives that place pharmacists in a leading role assisting older adults stay healthy and lead happy, productive lives.

01 February 2012

Taiwan Society of Health-System Pharmacists (TSHP) - Twinning Programme for Good Pharmacy Practice

Submitted by Lucy Yun-Ju Pan (International Committee Officer of TSHP)

The concept of Good Pharmacy Practice (GPP) was first introduced by the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) in 1993. Many pharmaceutical associations across the world today have adopted their own GPP Guidelines made suitable for the practical situation of pharmacy practice in their country based on the FIP GPP Guidelines.

In support of FIP's view of the need to assist developing countries achieve GPP, Taiwan Society of Health-system Pharmacists (TSHP) has strived to spread the practice of GPP in developing countries through a "GPP Collaborative Project". Its purpose is to encourage, coordinate and implement inter-country sharing of resources and to promote the exchange of materials and experiences in GPP. The GPP Collaborative Project was successfully initiated with the Mongolian Pharmaceutical Association in 2009 and the South American Pharmaceutical Federation in 2010.

Led by President Shin-Tarng Deng and General Secretary Mary Wang, TSHP in 2011 extended its inter-country cooperation to a new member organization of FIP, Nepal Pharmaceutical Association (NPA). As part of the Project, President Uttam Budathoki and Treasurer Ganesh Maharjan of NPA were invited to China Taiwan to gain an insight of the current state of pharmacy practice in China Taiwan and to facilitate the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between TSHP and NPA for collaboration on GPP. Current good pharmacy practices in both countries were shared at the TSHP Annual Conference in Taichung and field trips were coordinated to the Taiwan Drug Relief Foundation and Shin Kong Wu-Ho Su Memorial Hospital. The hospitality will be reciprocated this February when President Shin-Tarng Deng and General Secretary Mary Wang travels to Nepal to identify areas in which TSHP can provide further assistance in implementation of GPP in Nepal.

31 January 2012

WHO takes giant stride in promoting medicines safety worldwide

The World Health Organisation has taken a giant stride towards helping all countries improve drug safety monitoring by launching a freely accessible web-based pharmacovigilance toolkit.

The Pharmacovigilance Toolkit brings under one umbrella all WHO PV publications and (with permission) resources and information from other organisations on pharmacovigilance (that is, monitoring or surveillance of the safety of drugs in use in medical practice). It consists of a package of tools and a description of the supporting processes that are needed for the effective conduct of pharmacovigilance.

The main aim of the toolkit is to ensure that pharmacovigilance practitioners in low- and middle-income countries get access to the best information on the processes and activities involved in pharmacovigilance from a trusted source. All the material in the ‘PV Toolkit' is endorsed by the WHO Advisory Committee on the Safety of Medicinal Products after the original text had been written by selected experts and then edited by an internal team at the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, Sweden and the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, Africa (Ghana).

Funding for the toolkit development was provided by the WHO and it was led by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Advocacy and Training in Pharmacovigilance, University of Ghana Medical School, Accra, Ghana. "The production of the toolkit in Ghana demonstrates that emerging countries can develop and share world standard knowledge and resources among themselves if they are given an enabling environment and appropriate support," stated Prof Alex Dodoo, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre in Ghana.

The Toolkit can be accessed online at www.pvtoolkit.org and is also available on USB drives in web-like format for use in areas where there is no internet connectivity. The current version of the Toolkit is in English but it will be translated to other languages depending on the availability of funds and/or volunteers.

The Programme Manager of the WHO Pharmacovigilance Programme at WHO HQ Geneva, Dr Shanthi Pal, recommended the toolkit to all countries and called on all health development partners and the international community to continue to work with WHO as it develops, tests and deploys cost-effective solutions that will significantly improve global health and patient safety. She added:, "Given the appropriate financial support, the WHO Pharmacovigilance Programme can deploy cost-effective tools and technologies that will transform national health systems and make a huge improvement in patient safety. Without a strong pharmacovigilance system in all countries, patients will continue to suffer medicine-associated problems. This toolkit is the latest of WHO's contributions towards ensuring that all countries are able to develop effective systems that will reduce to the barest minimum, any medicine-related problems."

Further information on the toolkit is available from Prof Alex Dodoo (alex.dodoo@who-umc.org) or Dr Shanthi Pal (pals@who.int) or by emailing info@who-umc.org or info@pvafrica.org.