Summary

A significant amount of harm to patients and wastage of resources is caused through the use of unsafe, poor-quality medicines. The DTC has a role to ensure that all medicines prescribed and dispensed to patients are safe and of good quality. This involves:

• monitoring and addressing medication errors

• ensuring medicine quality through ensuring good practices concerning procurement, storage and distribution and monitoring and addressing drug quality problems

• monitoring and addressing adverse drug reactions, which may be caused by the chemical entity itself or may be due to medication errors or poor drug quality.

These activities necessarily involve looking at the health system as a whole to identify practices and environmental problems that may be contributing to poor drug safety and quality.