NDA compliance for pharmacy owners in Uganda: what actually gets checked

Pharmacy or drug shop: know which one you're licensed as

Uganda's National Drug Authority licenses two different kinds of retail outlet, and confusing the two is where a lot of compliance problems start. A pharmacy must be manned by a registered pharmacist and can stock and dispense the full range of medicines, including prescription-only drugs. A drug shop can be registered by another qualified health worker (a nurse, midwife, or clinical officer) but is licensed to sell a narrower range of over-the-counter medicines only.

Stocking outside what your license permits is one of the most common ways an outlet ends up on the wrong side of an inspection, before a single record is even checked.

What an inspector actually checks

Four things, in roughly this order:

1. Purchase records: who you bought from, what, how much, and crucially, the batch number and expiry date of every delivery.
2. Sales and dispensing records: for a pharmacy, this includes what was dispensed against which prescription.
3. The controlled drugs register: medicines classified as Class A, B, or restricted Class C drugs (narcotics and other restricted medicines) require their own record of every unit supplied, kept separately from ordinary sales.
4. Expired and returned stock: how you're documenting what's gone out of date and what you've done with it.

The controlled drugs register is where things usually break down

On paper, this sounds simple: log every controlled-drug sale in a dedicated book. In practice, it's the record most likely to have gaps, because it lives outside the normal sales flow. A cashier processes the sale at the till, and the register entry gets made "later." Except later sometimes doesn't happen, and the two records drift apart.

The fix isn't more discipline, it's less separation: the entry should happen as part of the sale, not as a second task after it.

Expiry is a compliance issue, not just a stock issue

An expired product still sitting on the shelf is a violation on its own, independent of anything else in your records. A simple weekly routine, reviewing what's within 90 days of expiry and pulling anything already expired, catches most of this before it becomes a problem, and selling oldest stock first (First-Expiry-First-Out) keeps it from recurring.

A routine that actually holds up

• Per delivery: record supplier, batch, and expiry before the stock goes on the shelf. A few minutes per delivery, not a backlog at month-end.
• Daily: someone responsible signs off that the day's records match what was actually sold.
• Weekly: review upcoming expiries, and check storage conditions for anything that needs refrigeration.
• Monthly: spot-audit the controlled drugs register and your fastest-moving products against physical stock.

Running more than one branch

Every branch needs its own independent set of records. An inspector at branch B isn't interested in branch A's paperwork. And stock moving between your own branches still needs to be documented as a transfer, not quietly absorbed into "stock on hand," or you'll have two branches whose books don't agree with either the delivery note or each other.

Where software actually helps, and where it doesn't

None of this is solved by buying software instead of doing the work, but the right system removes the gap where most of these records fall apart. SmarterPOS captures batch and expiry at the point of stock intake, flags products that require a prescription right at checkout, and its Expiry Report surfaces anything approaching its date, with a write-off you can action in one step instead of a separate manual process. Marking a product as controlled updates a register automatically the moment it's sold, instead of relying on someone remembering to log it separately, and it prints in a format ready to hand to an inspector. An audit log records who did what and when, and stock transfers between branches are logged as an actual dispatch-and-receive workflow, not a silent stock adjustment.

None of this replaces your license or your own responsibility for what it requires, but it does mean the underlying data (batch, expiry, who sold what, and every controlled-drug transaction) is captured once, at the point of sale, instead of reconstructed from memory later.

This is general information, not legal advice. Always confirm current requirements directly with the National Drug Authority for your specific license class.