Local patients are facing great risk due to the lax management on fake and low-quality medicine of all kinds.
Patients are unable to tell the quality of the drugs they are buying
Ineffective drug recall order
According to the regulations, after the discovery of low quality medicine, the Vietnam Drug Administration under the Ministry of Health or the local department of health must immediately issue the banned drug list to hospitals, pharmacies and enterprises to withdraw the medicine.
However due to the slow processing, the issuing of such instructions can take up to a month, making it difficult to control the activities of the drug stores or wholesalers, meaning low quality drugs have been released on the market already consumed.
Nguyen Thanh Ha, a worker of a certificated pharmacy said her store collected the list of recalled drugs once a month. "The list is for reference only, because we can't recall what people have already bought." Hoa said.
She further said the drugs are sold off the back of good advertising and because the pharmacy staff already had deals with the doctors.
Bui Hai Yen, owner of a drug store in Hoang Mai District, Hanoi said they wouldn't know anything unless the list of recalled drugs was sent. "Last year, a digestive enzyme was recalled by its company but we didn't know anything until a customer told us. We waited but no-one recalled the drug. It's lucky that we only had three packs so we got rid of them. I don't know what we would we do if we’d had a big stock." she said.
Head Pharmacist of a hospital in Hanoi said he received documents and news about low quality drugs that had to be recovered every month. But the recalls were totally voluntary as there aren’t any managers or monitoring agency. He said if the government didn’t issue guidelines the distributors and the enterprises rarely comply with the regulation on recalling the drugs. "They'll sell anything and customers are unable to tell if their drugs are good or not."
A representative of the Drug Administration admitted that was not easy to monitor and recall low quality drugs with over 40,000 pharmacies and over 20,000 registered drugs. But what is noteworthy is that most of the drugs that have been on recall order are imported and were also approved by the local department of health or the Drug Administration.
No compensation for patients
Despite the rise of fake and low quality medicines, the customers are not entitled to compensation.
Le Quoc Thinh, Head Pharmacist of Thanh Hoa 71 Central Hospital said low quality drugs may not cause problems, but it was dangerous for people who have chronic diseases. "For example, a patient with diabetes is advised to use hypoglycemic drugs but if they accidentally take poor-quality drugs, their blood glucose will surge, threatening their lives." said Thinh.
Data on the number of people that have experienced worsened health due to low quality drugs remains unclear. However pharmacists said none of their patients return low quality drugs. Therefore, no company is required to compensate patients.
"We advised people to return the medicine immediately. But if they’ve already taken it then we can't do anything." said Deputy Director of the Hanoi Health Department Nguyen Van Yen.
Trinh Van Lau, former head of National Institute of Drug Quality Control said post-testing has been tightened up recently, and many drugs that either have cosmetic changes or differing concentrations of ingredient will be reported. "The manufacturer or the distributors are responsible for recalling the drugs. But they haven't shown any intention of compensating for the patients."
