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Journal of Agricultural Science and Botany | Volume: 2
November 15-16, 2018 | Paris, France
Plant Science
Natural Products,Medicinal Plants and Traditional Medicines
International Conference on
Joint Event
&
Strengths and weaknesses of the herbal medicine registration system in Bahrain
Azhar H Alostad, Douglas T Steinke and Ellen I Schafheutle
University of Manchester, UK
The primary goal of a country’s Drug Regulatory Authority
(DRA) is to ensure that all products on the market are safe,
effective and meet the approved quality standards. Kuwait
however, lacks appropriate herbal medicines (HMs) regulations
causing consumer safety issues. An important part of informing
effective policy formation is to understand strengths and
weaknesses in more advanced systems. As part of a wider
research programme to inform a registration system for HMs
in Kuwait, this study aimed to highlight the main strengths
and weaknesses of the HMs registration system in Bahrain, a
country similar to Kuwait, which does not manufacture but
import all HMs and has a HM registration system. With ethics
and Bahrain DRA approval, eight face-to-face semi-structured
interviews were conducted with key officials involved in the
registration of HMs in Bahrain. Interview data were analysed
using thematic framework analysis. Participants perceived
the major strengths of the current registration system as:
having appropriate registration guidelines in place which
are continuously updated, having an increased level of
transparency by publishing registration activities and sharing
these publicly, being a trusted reference source for other
countries in the region and being an independent entity not
influenced by governmental higher powers providing full
autonomy of introducing new policies. Some of the major
perceived weaknesses of the current system were the lack in
the organisational structure and hierarchy which is causing
communication difficulties between departments, the restraint
in financial resources to invest in continuous staff training,
the significant lack of human resources causing workload and
delay in submission to deadlines, and absence of important
regulatory activities such as a pharmacovigilance system.
It is anticipated that this study will provide evidencebased
lessons for Kuwait and other countries with unsophisticated
drug regulatory systems to design effective HMs regulation.
Speaker Biography
Azhar Alostad is a pharmacist with qualifications in MPharm and MSc. She has expertise
in pharmaceutical and herbal regulations. Since her graduation, she worked as a scientific
reviewer in the Kuwaiti Drug Regulatory Authority. In 2016, she started her PhD in
Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom
supervised by the coauthors Ellen Schafheutle and Douglas Steinke. Her PhD research
aims to introduce suitable guidelines for the registration of herbal medicines in Kuwait.
e:
Azhar Alostad, Plant science & Natural Medicine 2018, Volume 2
DOI: 10.4066/2591-7897-C1-003