Council develops district pharmacy programme

A district pharmacy programme under which districts will be provided with a satellite pharmacy to complement the services of the National Health Insurance Scheme has been developed by the Pharmacy Council.
Under the programme all the regions would be provided with equitable spread of facilities to address the skewed distribution of pharmacies in Ghana. The Greater Accra and Ashanti regions together have a pharmacy strength of about 84 per cent of the total number of pharmacies in the country.
The Registrar of the Pharmacy Council, Mr Joseph K.N. Nyoagbe, who disclosed this in an interview with the Daily Graphic, said the council was currently evaluating the cost of the project and conducting an operational research to make the programme evidence-based for its successful implementation.
He disclosed that as part of the programme district pharmacies had already been established in Jirapa in the Upper West Region and Dambai in the Northern Region to address the shortage of pharmacies particularly in the northern part of the country.
He stated that to ensure that there were staff to man the district pharmacies the Council would partner the Ghana Health Service to post superintendent pharmacists to the districts in an effort to buy into the programme.
Mr Nyaogbe explained that the council was beefing up some of its regional offices with the provision of vehicles and other logistics to ensure regular inspection of pharmaceutical facilities.
According to him, his office had received reports of charlatans masquerading as pharmacists who had gone to the extent of setting up illegal facilities and described such acts as challenges facing the council.
He acknowledged that even though some of them might be genuine pharmacists they failed to go through the appropriate process of obtaining a licence.
He said as part of its effort at sensitising the public to the need to patronise the services of only recognised pharmacists and herbal medicine practitioners the council was, through public education, alerting institutions such as churches and schools to such charlatans.
To that end Mr Nyoagbe said the council was in the process of setting up an extranet facility where it could be possible for qualified pharmacists in any part of the country to apply for a licence via the Internet without “necessarily spending their time and resources coming to Accra to do so”.
The registrar expressed regret that the Governing Council whose term expired in 2007 had not been reconstituted and noted that the absence of such a council was making it difficult for his office to enforce disciplinary measures against members who indulged in any professional misconduct.