New drugs licence makes big impact
In May 2020 UK-Med became one of the few NGOs in the UK, licensed to procure, store, export and supply medicines to patients overseas – enabling a faster response to more medical emergencies whereever they may be.
In addition to our existing partnership with Palladium procuring, UK-Med storing and DFID exporting and supplying medicines to our UK-EMT programmes – our newly granted Wholesale Distribution Authorisation (WDA) licence will allow us to manage the entire medical product supply chain in house on smaller UK-Med emergency responses. This is an important step forward in our journey to becoming an independent and more self-sufficient medical emergency relief NGO.
UK-Med’s Pharmacist Claire Simpson says: ‘This drastically changes what we can do – previously we could respond to non-UK-EMT funded programmes but only by contributing medical personnel – which we’ve done with great success through our response to the measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 in partnership with the Australian Medical Assistance Team (AUSMAT) and the 2020 COVID 19 response in the Rohingya Refugee Camps in Bangladesh with the International Office of Migration (IOM). However, this extended WDA licence means UK-Med could in theory respond in full to any upcoming medical emergency with a field hospital, personnel and now medicines.’
Arriving at this position however, has been no mean feat and it’s testament to the nine months of hard work and commitment from our pharmacy and logistics teams: Pharmacist Claire Simpson, Logistics Manager Richard Dear, Warehouse Manager Rob Dick and new recruits Warehouse Assistant Tom Los and Procurement and Supply Chain Lead Gabbi Gray; and John Finey at Pharmacy Consulting LTD.
Claire says: ‘Many hours have been spent filling out standard operating procedures, justifying why we need to procure certain unlicensed drugs in this country and installing air-conditioning, temperature data logging systems and giant refrigerator containers into our north west based warehouse so we can safely store the drugs once bought. There’s a real art to storing medicine – but that’s another story.’ All this work in readiness for the inspections (which were successful) from the Home Office in January 2020 and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in March of this year. Once again, this is a fine example of a great team effort. Well done team!