The World Health Organisation (WHO) has benchmarked the Food and Drugs Authority, Ghana (FDA Ghana) after a rigorous benchmarking process, which came to an end on March 29, 2019.

The WHO commended the Authority for many strengths identified and agreed on the institutional development plan to build upon identified gaps for regulatory systems improvement.

A statement signed by Mr James Lartey, FDA Head of Communications and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra on Tuesday said the international body paid a working visit to the FDA from March 25 to 30, this year.

The statement said the visit formed part of its process towards monitoring and strengthening the regulatory system of National Regulatory Authorities to promote equitable access to quality, safe and efficacious medical products.

The statement said the five-day visit was aimed at verifying the Authority’s capacity in the registration, market surveillance, inspection, licensing, vigilance, clinical trial oversight and laboratory testing functions.

It said it was part of the mandates of WHO to provide guidance and support for efficient National Medicines Regulatory Authorities to ensure that available medicines were of good quality, and to fight against counterfeited medicines.

It said the assessment of the national regulatory authority using the global benchmarking tool of the WHO, was meant to bring out the existing competencies and identified gaps that needed to address to make a national medicine authority effective in its regulatory functions.

The statement said the WHO Regulatory System Strengthening team, under the medicines, vaccines and pharmaceuticals clusters was the team that undertook the assessment of the FDA Ghana.

It added that the assessors praised the FDA for the systems put in place to ensure the protection of public health and safety, urging the authority to implement the recommendations made towards upgrading the status of FDA as WHO reference country in Africa within 2019.