What records should be available during an inspection?

The ones that describe what you hold and where it went: the licence, the controlled drugs register, records of what was received and from whom, and evidence that expired stock is separated from sellable stock. The test is whether they can be produced there and then — a record that takes twenty minutes to find is one nobody has been keeping daily.

What is the easiest fault to fix before an inspection?

Expired stock still sitting among sellable stock. It is the fastest thing to find, the hardest to explain, and it can be cleared in an afternoon. Walk the shelf and pull anything out of date into a separate, clearly marked place.

Does software make a pharmacy inspection-ready?

No. It can make the records easy to produce and hard to lose, and it can stop expired stock being sold. It cannot arrange your premises, supervise your staff or hold your licence. An inspection is about the shop, and the paperwork is only part of it.

Guide · Uganda

An NDA inspection: what to have ready

Ask around and the advice you get about inspections is mostly rumour — what happened to somebody's cousin in Mbale, an Instagram post with a checklist on it. There is very little written for the person who has to open the door.

Read this next to the source, not instead of it. The licence classes, what each may stock, and what an inspection formally covers are set by the National Drug Authority, and they change. This is about being ready — it is not a statement of the requirements, and where the two differ, theirs governs.

The question underneath every question

An inspection is not really a test of whether your paperwork is neat. It is a test of one thing: can you account for what came in and what went out. Almost everything asked for is a way of getting at that.

Which is why the awkward moments are rarely about a missing document. They are about a document that exists but disagrees with the shelf.

Have these where you stand, not in the back

Your licence, current and displayed. An expired licence is not a paperwork fault, it is trading without one.
The controlled drugs register, written up to today — not to last week. What belongs on each line is its own subject, and it is the record most likely to be examined closely.
What you received, and from whom. Invoices or delivery notes for your stock, and ideally in an order somebody else could follow.
Somebody qualified on the premises. Whatever your class of licence requires, the person it requires should be there, and not on their way.

The word doing the work above is produceable. A register that takes twenty minutes to find is a register nobody has been keeping daily, and that is the inference an inspector will reasonably draw.

The three faults worth fixing this week

Expired stock among sellable stock. The fastest thing to find, the hardest to explain, and an afternoon's work to clear. Walk the shelf, pull anything out of date into a separate marked place, and keep it separate — "we were about to return it" is not a defence when it is sitting between two live tins.
A register that disagrees with the shelf. Count one controlled line today. If the book says fourteen and the shelf holds twelve, that gap exists whether or not anybody has looked, and finding it yourself is a completely different conversation from having it found.
Supplies with no name against them. Blank recipient columns are the most common finding in a book that is otherwise well kept, and they are the hardest to fix afterwards, because nobody remembers.

What an inspection is not

It is not a surprise in the sense people fear. Most of what is looked at is visible from the doorway — how stock is arranged, whether expired items are separated, whether the place is clean and secure, whether the register is on the counter rather than in a drawer under something.

A shop that keeps its records daily has already passed most of it before anybody arrives. A shop that keeps them monthly is relying on the visit falling in the right week.

Where software earns its place

In CareBoon, the controlled drugs register line is written by the same action that sells the medicine, in the same transaction — so it cannot fall behind, because there is no separate step to forget. Expired stock is refused at the counter rather than flagged. And when the book and the shelf disagree, the screen says so instead of quietly correcting one to match the other.

What it will not do: it cannot arrange your shelves, separate your expired stock, hold your licence or put a qualified person behind the counter. It does not tell you which medicines the NDA classes as controlled — that is the regulator's list and it changes — and it does not deal with the NDA on your behalf. An inspection is about the shop. Records are the part software can carry.

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