The US Ambassador to Namibia, H.E. Thomas F. Daughton, launched CBART group ARV refills on June 1, 2017. These groups are implemented widely in Onandjokwe and other districts in northern Namibia, where the HIV burden is high. During the CBART group ARV refill initiative launch, the ambassador remarked “simple solutions = best solutions; bring the … Read more
Yousef Makar is the Chief Pharmacist at the Windhoek Central Hospital, Namibia’s national referral hospital for specialised health care services for the past five years. Before July 2016, Yousef and other pharmacy managers in government health facilities faced huge challenges in managing the inventory of pharmaceuticals with frequent stock-outs of key pharmaceuticals because consumption information … Read more
The SIAPS Program wrapped up its years of work in Namibia with an event in Windhoek on March 14. The program has worked in the country since 2011 to strengthen pharmaceutical management, helping to improve access to quality-assured medicines and related skilled services. SIAPS’ activities focused on enhancing pharmaceutical service delivery, health workforce availability, information … Read more
A multicountry user experience analysis of e-TB Manager and an in-depth study in Ukraine were published. However, the procedural aspects of e-TB Manager implementation in each country were not documented. While facilitators and barriers for eHealth implementation in resource-constrained settings are well known, the objective of this paper is to summarize the tailored implementation approaches given local context, which … Read more
Theresia Cloete was diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) in 2002. She was put on treatment but after four months stopped taking her TB medication. Last year, she was diagnosed with drug-resistant TB. Like Cloete, many TB patients stop taking their life-saving medication before they are cured. She is now one of eight in-patients waiting for stabilization … Read more
In the last five years, SIAPS has provided technical assistance to the Namibia Medicines Regulatory Council (NMRC) to strengthen its capacity for registration and quality testing by training technical staff in medicines dossier evaluation, developing guidelines for conducting the routine PMS of quality of medicines, and collecting medicine samples at selected ART and TB treatment sites … Read more
SIAPS provided technical assistance to facilitate the expedited assessment and registration of new and existing ARV formulations to support the implementation of the revised Namibian ART guidelines (dated January 2014). The technical assistance focused on improving the efficiency of the regulatory system so that the recommended new first-line fixed-dose combination ARVs that contain tenofovir and … Read more
In Namibia, USAID has been providing funding for technical assistance in the areas of pharmaceutical management and systems strengthening since 2003. During this period, the Rational Pharmaceutical Management Plus (RPM Plus) and Strengthening Pharmaceutical Systems (SPS) programs were implemented. RPM Plus supported interventions that largely focused on strengthening systems for the antiretroviral therapy (ART) and … Read more
The SIAPS team in Namibia joined other PEPFAR-implementing partners for the orientation of USAID’s newly appointed Director for Southern Africa, Mr. John Groarke. On September 27-28, 2017, Mr. Groake visited health facilities in the Omusati and Oshana regions in the North Central part of Namibia where he received updates on the progress of the community-based … Read more
SIAPS Namibia staff helped the Pharmaceutical Services Division of the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MOHSS) of Namibia to revise the National Medicines Policy (NMP). The NMP, launched in 1998 and revised in 2012, provides guidelines and development objectives for the country’s pharmaceutical sectors.[1] It provides the framework within which pharmaceutical sector priorities are … Read more
