Health Ministry says 85 City chemists meet standards

HCM City (VNA) -- Around 85 drug stores in Ho Chi Minh City are
qualified to meet the new Good Pharmacy Practices (GPP) standard.

This follows an order from the Ministry of Health last year that requires
all pharmacies to meet the GPP standard by 2011 in order to remain in
operation.

The GPP standard requires pharmacy owners to have a pharmacist's certificate
and a pharmacist always on duty. It further requires that drugs clearly
display their origin of manufacture and instructions for storage and use.

Out of the 85 GPP-complicant drug stores, 41 are managed by city hospitals,
with the rest being privately-owned.

Recently, the HCM City Department of Health has set a target to get 100
percent of the city's pharmacies GPP-complicant in 2009. Out of the country's
approximate 3,816 pharmacies, 70 percent are in HCM City .

Pham Khanh Phong Lan, the department's deputy head, said she was urging
public hospitals to be the vanguard in standard compliance, since hospital
pharmacies make up 70 percent of the city's drug market.

One of the most challenging tasks for drug store owners in complying with
the standard is finding qualified pharmacists to staff their stores.

Trinh Nguyen Tuyen, owner of the Thien An Drugstore in Tan Binh District,
said that while she could afford to comply with all the GPP's requirements,
she was unable to find a pharmacist.

According to Lan, the city's medicine branch is facing a great challenge in
staffing pharmacists. She attributed this to the fact that 100 percent of
pharmacists open their own pharmacies.

HCM City has around 3,956 pharmacists, at a rate of 4.5 pharmacists
per 1,000 people. This is three times higher than the national rate but is
still lower that the world's average.-Enditem