Pharmaceutical Chemistry Section
About the Section
This Section examines pharmaceutical items for compliance with national pharmacopoeial standards, such as the British Pharmacopoeia and the United States Pharmacopeia and support to the market surveillance programme for monitoring the quality of the local registered pharmaceutical products.
Pharmaceutical Samples
Responsibilities
This Section conducts analyses for enforcement of the following Ordinances:
- The Pharmacy and Poisons Ordinance
- The Antibiotics Ordinance
In addition, the Section analyses pharmaceutical products, which are submitted by the Department of Health and the Hospital Authority, to check on the compliance with specifications.
Quality Assurance
About 20% of the tests conducted in the Section are for QC purpose.
Key Instruments
The following instruments are used routinely by the Section:
- Liquid Chromatograph with High Resolution Mass Spectrometer
- Liquid Chromatograph with Tandem Mass Spectrometer
- Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer
- High Performance Liquid Chromatograph with various detectors
- Gas Chromatograph with various detectors
- Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer
- Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer
- UV Spectrophotometer
- Fluorescence Spectrophotometer
- Capillary Electrophoresis System
- Disintegration Tester
- Dissolution Tester
- Density Meter
- Flow Injection Analyzer
Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer
Targets and Key Indicators
Key Performance Measures Relating to the Statutory Testing of Pharmaceuticals
Targets #
# For targets where reporting time is mentioned, different samples require different analytical procedures, hence different reporting time. The quoted number of working days required represents an average of reporting time for the different types of samples and test requests within the category, while the target (in percentage) is the total compliance rate of the concerned samples and test requests within a particular category against their respective targets.
Key Indicators
‡ As the testing requirements for urgent samples relating to food, pharmaceuticals and Chinese medicine incidents respectively fluctuated in previous years, it is difficult to estimate the occurrence of the type of incidents or the number of tests required.