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Many of you have heard about FDA's recent initiative called FDA Beyond our Borders which includes placing FDA staff in foreign countries to help regulate products coming into the United States. But you might not realize that this is just a small addition to the many thousands of FDA personnel who are already deployed in FDA District offices and laboratories in numerous locations across the entire USA.
My Take on deploying talented professionals in the field is that they are critical to our efforts to ensure that quality is built into the products we regulate as well as prevent, intervene, and respond to the challenges of both globalization and the accelerated pace of progress in science and technology. Simply stated, FDA must be where the action is. This means even further expanding our diverse cadre of regulatory experts capable of overseeing the full range of the products we regulate, from food to drugs, devices and cosmetics. It also means providing inspectors with state-of-the-art scientific tools, equipping our field laboratories with sophisticated technologies for product testing, and building closer cooperation with local authorities through modern information technologies.
But in addition to our field operations at home and abroad, all of FDA must keep pace with the new programs and initiatives that are underway. We need many new employees, including not only health care professionals, consumer safety officers, and mission support personnel, but we must also recruit individuals with new skill sets and expertise in fields such as nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, and computational biology.
Fortunately, thanks to our appropriations and our user fees, the FDA will fill more than 1,300 positions over the next several months to grow our workforce to the numbers commensurate with the tasks before us.
FDA is rightly regarded as one of the finest employers in the United States government -- and job satisfaction at our agency includes knowing that we protect your health, and that of your family. This is a great foundation upon which to build the global force for the FDA of the 21st century.
I will be traveling to Europe and China next week and will look forward to giving you Andy's Take from the road.
Andy
Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D.
Commissioner of Food and Drugs
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