18 Sep SAHPRA acknowledges World Patient Safety Day
Patient safety resonates with SAHPRA’s mission of ensuring that the public is protected by registering and regulating all health products so that they comply with SAHPRA’s pillars of safety, quality, efficacy and performance.
This involves ensuring that stringent regulatory requirements are followed before any health product is made available to the public. SAHPRA ensures that no product is made available for use and consumption if it is substandard or falsified in any way.
It must be noted that while medicines are intended to prevent, manage and cure diseases, they can also have side effects, some of which maybe undesirable and / unexpected. SAHPRA, launched the Med Safety App which allows patients to report any adverse drug reactions including adverse events following immunisation on this App as a means of notifying the regulator. This allows SAHPRA to monitor these and to alert patients of possible side effects. Secondly, it enables SAHPRA to communicate such to the manufacturers and ensure that they act accordingly.
World patient safety day aims to raise awareness of medication-related harm caused due to errors and unsafe practices and advocate urgent action to improve medication safety for patients. Medication related harm accounts for up to half of the overall preventable harm in medical care.
SAHPRA monitors illegal health products and unethical behaviour by individuals and entities that may have an impact on patient safety. SAHPRA partners with law enforcement agencies to curb any such illegal actions.
WHO’s 5 Moments for Medication Safety
In bringing more awareness to World Patient Safety Day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has developed a “5 Moments for Medication Safety” that is beneficial and useful to healthcare workers, patients, families, and the general public. These moments allow both the patient and healthcare worker to reflect on critical questions that can greatly reduce the risks of medication errors. See here for a more a detailed outlook on the 5 Moments of Medication Safety.