KUWAIT CITY, Jan 23: 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 sector hospitals and clinics.
Assistant Undersecretary for Drug and Food Control Affairs, Dr. Abdullah Al-Badr, called the new ministerial decision a qualitative move in the field of regulation and control of medical devices in Kuwait in line with international regulations and standards including biomedical devices, reports Al-Rai daily.
He indicated the decision classifies medical devices into four categories in terms of how they are used and the extent of their impact on their users, so that the regulatory conditions, studies and requirements for registration are commensurate with the category to which the medical device is subjected to.
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 low-risk conditions, or to compensate for the deficiencies in some physiological functions in the human body.
On the other hand, 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.
He pointed out that among the other positive aspects of writing the prescription under the scientific name instead of the trade name is to avoid repeating the same medicines with different names, which may lead to the patient receiving a double dose of the drug, as well as not being biased or promoting a particular pharmaceutical company, as well as solving the problem of shortage of some types of medicines which may occur for various reasons related to the supplier company or the pharmaceutical manufacturer or any other control reasons such as withdrawal, cancellation or suspension of the product, in addition to facing monopoly and providing many drug options for the patient.
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