Welcome to TIPC
TIPC is the Ministry of Health and Social Services Therapeutics Information and Pharmacovigilance Centre for the provision of unbiased and up-to-date therapeutics information for both the health care providers and the general public.
The need for this medicine information centre in Namibia has long been established. The National Drug Policy (NDP) of 1998 actually recommends the establishment of a drug information center and an adverse reaction monitoring unit linked to the Medicines Control Council (MCC) to coordinate adverse reaction reporting and to manage data collection, analysis and dissemination. The Namibia Medicines and Related Substances Control Act, 2003 (Act. No. 13 of 2003) requires the reporting of Adverse Medicine Reactions (AMRs) by health professionals. Thus, a working group was formed under the leadership of the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MoHSS) to sets-up a center combining the twin functions of medicines information and pharmacovigilance.
TIPC was successfully launched in May 2008 with the general objective of sensitizing healthcare professionals and the public of Namibia to the servces of TIPC, which include answering queries on medicines and receiving AMR reports.
The centre responds to therapeutic enquiries using telephone, fax and e mail. The therapeutics information bulletin and the centre’s web page are used to proactively disseminate current therapeutic information. Our services for the general public emphasize on patient treatment literacy for medicines widely used in public health programs. Basic information about medicines use and medicine associated issuse are communicated to the general public by using the Namibian news paper every fortnight.
Reports of adverse events from patients and health professionals are entered in to a database called vigiflow and this information is shared to the WHO international medicine monitoring centre in Uppsala , Sweden.
Mission of TIPC
To improve the rational and safe use of medicines in Namibia