E-drug: Public Health Pharmacy in Africa
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Dear e-druggers,
We all are familiar with the core roles public health professionals engage themselves in when confronted with a health challenge. Pharmacists are continuously being invited to engage themselves as key players in public health whether at the macro level or at the micro level.
In Sub-Saharan Africa especially in the West, Central and East African regions, pharmacists do not only prescribe and dispense medicines (all types of medicines), they do also provide reasonable advice and participate in disease prevention and health promotion activities. Most often, these activities stay "under the counter" because they go undocumented and at times are unauthorised by law. Because of this it is difficult to package the public health functions of the pharmacist in a way that they can be used as evidence to justify for a greater pharmacists involvement in the public health systems as frontliners and also to seek for the remunerations that follow.
Though the roles played by various pharmacy service actors (hospital pharmacists, community, etc) may seem obvious, I am interested in knowing the roles pharmacists (hospital, community, industrial etc play in the different parts of Sub-Saharan Africa to promote the core public health functions and the challenges they face in discharging these functions. Equally, I am interested in learning from pharmacists who are practicing or have practiced in Sub-Saharan Africa, how they describe and have documented their success stories with respect to diseases prevalent in this geographic area. I also would like to know the major challenges pharmacists face in discharging their functions and how they struggle with or have overcome them.
Robert Chana Chapchet
Pharmacist, Cameroon
chana_robert@yahoo.co.uk
Dear Robert,
To enhance their relevance, particularly in developing countries, pharmacists have to be innovative and carve their own niches rather than compete with other professionals for the givens. Some of the areas where pharmacists could play a prominent role in Africa include procurement and supply management, strengthening pharmacovigilance systems and improving issues around pharmaceutical governance. In addition, today’s pharmacists could together rethink approaches to improving the rational use of medicines. After three decades of largely successful initiatives to improve the rational use of medicines such as INRUD, perhaps the time has come to engineer follow-ons to these hugely successful interventions of the 80s-90s.
My more direct comment to your contribution, Robert, is that professional opportunities are never handed to a group on a silver plate. The relevant profession has to show evidence of its value and then advocate for it.
Dr. Lloyd Matowe
Pharmaceutical Systems Africa
www.pharmasystafrica.com
samanyika@hotmail.com
E-drug : Public Health Pharmacy in Africa (3)
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Dear All
Very good points Lloyd. My question is to what extent are pharmacy
training institutions preparing their graduates to undertake these
roles? Are African pharmacy curricula responding to these important
national needs? I suspect that most curricula are still focused on
scientific content rather than the outcomes that you have mentioned. I
would be delighted to be proved wrong.
cheers,
Billy
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Billy Futter
Strategy lead
WHO UNESCO FIP Pharmacy Education Taskforce
Emeritus Associate Professor
Rhodes University
B.Futter@ru.ac.za
E-drug: Public Health Pharmacy in Africa (4)
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Dear All,
I share with Robert the need for greater involvement of Pharmacists in Public Health especially in sub-Saharan Africa where we are continuously faced with a series of diseases not to talk of climate change that grossly affects the entire continent. Pharmacists encounter lots of challenges in terms of lack of an enabling environment to practice. In some instances there is total system failure. Coupled with these challenges, pharmacists needs to have a paradigm shift, not neglecting the drug product but a more patient-centered approach, documenting all their activities and processes, because working hard with out documentation is not good for the practice.
Pharm. A.M. Habeeb B.Pharm, MBA
Kano. Nigeria
pharmhabeeb@yahoo.co.uk
Re: [e-drug] Public Health Pharmacy in Africa (3)
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Most if not all pharmacy schools in Nigeria have incorporated public health pharmacy into their curriculum and the pharmacists are rendering public health services to the populace but these services are not documented.
Thanks.
Dr. (Mrs.) B.A. Aina Dept. of Clinical Pharmacy and Biopharmacy Faculty of Pharmacy University of Lagos CMUL Campus, Idi Araba,Lagos, NIGERA Tel +234 8023091623