Assessment of the supply pattern of medicine in Tanzania

Across sectional retrospective study on assessing the supply pattern of medicine and how it influences the quality of medicine in Tanzania was carried out to know whether or not the population has access to drugs that are of good quality and efficacious. The study also aimed to find out the nature and frequency of quality control checks under taken by TFDA, to determine the number of companies supplying medicine in Tanzania. The study was conducted in this year involving face to face interview plus retrospective record data sampling method were used in data collection. Some of key results of the study include by scanning through individual drugs from the TFDA drug database we saw there was variation of importation trends if many drugs. But also there was consistency of some drugs example Abacavir and Acabose as we have seen only one l supplier of each individual drugs for the all study period. The general analysis of the data showed many variation of supplier for many individual drugs and this might cause the supply of poor drugs. The major recommendation is that promoting good procurement practices in the public sector by registration or pre-qualification of supplier i.e. purchasing from reliable and approved source and more emphasis should be given to testing for initial quality, the routine testing of new supplier, ensuring adherence of manufactures _ and suppliers to GMP.