Medicines Quality Assurance Information Exchange


Substandard medicines pose an enormous public health challenge across both developed and developing countries. The small-island states of the Western Pacific face particular risks due to under-developed regulatory systems and the difficulties of fully implementing World Health Organization (WHO) Quality Assurance systems.

WHO-Western Pacific Regional Office is supporting a regional information sharing scheme to bring together pre-qualification information on suppliers, manufacturer certifications and individual products. This site will serve as a resource for participating countries wishing to reduce the workload and technical requirements associated with Quality Assurance mechanisms.

The mechanism will make supplier (wholesaler) information and documentation available but manufacturer information (given to us by wholesalers) will be stored securely and is available on request. Countries are able to use this documentation to carry out pre-qualification of their suppliers.

This site is a shared resource that also brings together the above information, as well as laboratory testing results, visual inspection reports and product specifications (to support tendering). We ask participating countries to share the results of all Quality testing of products, from visual inspection to laboratory testing and post-approval field reports. These are then made instantly available to all other participating countries and are expected to be used to guide procurement and product recalls where necessary.