Enhance Effective Measure Development on Food Pre-marketing Control in Provincial Public Health Offices

Abstract

Background: Supervision of food products before they are distributed to markets throughout Thailand confirms that consumers are safe, worthwhile, and profitable through onsite audits and considers food products to comply with laws. The Thai Food and Drug Administration has been giving regulatory powers to the regions since 1992, but with changed in laws and procedures, coupled with the advancement of production technologies and product developments that lead to innovation that is more complicated, as a result, the same direction cannot be performed.

Objectives: To analyze the situation, problems, and limitations of food pre-marketing control in the Provincial Public Health Offices (PPHO) and to come up with measures to enhance the efficiency of the supervision process of food pre-marketing control in the PPHO.

Methods: It was a quantitative and qualitative study. By collecting personnel information, issues that included discussions or questions of PPHO officers, and related information from the Food Act, Notifications of the Ministry of Public Health, FDA regulations, FDA orders, people's manuals, operating guidelines, and the operating system currently in use, it was then analyzed by using a fishbone chart.

Results: From the study, the situation in considering food product requests of PPHO during the fiscal years 2019–2021 found that the number of applications increased by 21.83% (year 2020) and 14.1 (year 2021) when compared to the year 2019. Most were low-risk food products, such as ready-to-cook food, ready-to-eat food, ready-to-eat food, drinking water, etc. As for the discussions or questions of the PPHO, it was found that line channel was the most used at 96.76%, of which the top three questions were food classification, determining food names, and the guidelines and documents used in applying for permission and importing food production at 22.34, 18.52, and 14.47%, respectively. As for the problems and limitations found, they were: (1) different laws or regulations and approval considerations, where PPHO was authorized to consider controlled food products only in the case of food additives produced by packaging products with serial numbers; food already that it allows certain types of food that are of a certain quality standard and food that must be labeled, including the place of import; and (2) pharmacist accounted for 81.76% of workers in the provincial region, followed by public health technical officer and other at 10.38 and 7.86%, respectively, but they did not have food and drug technical officer in the provinces: 92.11, 5.29, and 2.63%, respectively. In addition, it was found that the workers of the PPHO had many main tasks, such as the Drug Act, which was more than the operators of the Food and Drug Administration, who were only for the Food Act; and (3) some operating procedures were not stored electronically. There were four guidelines for proposals for work efficiency improvements, namely, protocol: the amendment of the notification of the Ministry of Public Health to have standard quality requirements according to the type of food; process: improvement and development of the approval process; power: the authorization of the PPHO according to the risks and complexity of considering permission; and people: knowledge development of operators.

Conclusion: The demand for public-sector food products was rising. There were three important problems and limitations: (1) the regulations and approvals according to the level of food risks were different; (2) the qualifications and workloads of the personnel working between the PPHO and the Food Division were different; and (3) not all application submission systems were fully electronic.