FDA probes Tamale Teaching Hospital over claims of expired drugs

The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) Office in the Northern Region has commenced investigations into allegations that authorities at the Tamale Teaching Hospital have been administering expired drugs.

According to FDA, there are lots of expired drugs at the health facility which they’ve arranged to dispose safely.

There were some reports recently that the only major referral hospital in Northern Ghana, was administering expired anaesthetic drugs at its surgical theatres, prompting a closure after reported complications from some patients.

The Northern Regional Director of FDA, Martin Kusi has said his outfit is hopeful that the audit will be completed by end of this month (June) to allow for the destruction of the expired drugs.

“We went in to investigate, now we have lots of expired drugs in Tamale Teaching Hospital which we have arranged to dispose off. For now we have not finished taking the inventory we are hopeful by the end of the month we’ll be able to finish the inventory and then we”ll procdeed from there to go and have the disposal of the medicines which are expired at the hospital.

“There are a lot of administrative procedure that one will have to go through before being allowed to take an action or activity and these are some of the things that we have to endure, we couldn’t just go straight foward to the hospital to take inventory. We had to write to the Chief Executive, he had to reply and later on we were given the access to take inventory of the medicines.”