Health Surveillance actions in pharmaceutical products and services in a large municipality in Northeastern Brazil

Introduction: Health Surveillance acts through inspection to prevent people, establishments, or processes from producing situations of risk to individual and collective health. Objective: To present a situational diagnosis of the sanitary actions of the area of pharmaceutical products and services in the city of Fortaleza - Ceara, registered in the Fiscalize system, from January 2018 to December 2019. Method: Access to the tax system, search by registration group and registration date, with the visualization and copy of the content, individually, of each inspection. The data were stratified into notified and fined, categorized by type of establishment, neighborhood and date of occurrence, non-compliance found, and legislation used in the reasoning. The results were expressed in absolute and relative frequencies. Results: A total of 614 establishments were inspected, 948 inspections were carried out and 2,830 were found to be sanitary inadequacies, of which 385 (23.60%) were registered and 2,445 (86.40%) were reported. The irregularities found varied according to those inspected. Drugstore was the most frequent group among establishments (420/614; n = 68.40%) and the lack of mandatory sanitary documentation was the prevalent non-conformity (491/2,830; n = 17.30%). The legislation most used to substantiate irregularities was RDC Anvisa No. 44/2009, used in 45.20% (1,279/2.830) of inadequacies. In the distribution by neighborhoods, the city center concentrated the largest number of inspected (44/614; n = 7.20%). Conclusions: The results showed that most of the inspected establishments followed the legally provided sanitary standards, because only a minority of the sanitary non-conformities found were grounds for action, while the vast majority were only notified to present improvements.