What about Public Health?

Some of the lobby groups and organizations either think pharmacy is genuinely critical in making the larger society healthier through their constant contact with the public or they have actually realized this but are doing nothing more than cashing in on it. The question is; are the pharmacists driving this process, or have they lived up to their reputation of staying back and hope things will work out well for them?

Here are excerpts from one of the organizations trying to implement pharmacy-centred public health interventions:


The RxGen project: Strengthening pharmacies capacity to serve youth
Implementer: PATH starting from year 2000.

Concept note:
“We would like to highlight the RxGen project, a pharmacy-based program that worked to increase youth’s access to reproductive health services and products. Worldwide, rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are highest among young people aged 15 to 24 years, and complications from pregnancy, childbirth, and unsafe abortions have become the major causes of death for girls aged 15 to 19.
Youth need better access to reproductive health information, services, and supplies.
Pharmacies as untapped resources Licensed and regulated commercial pharmacies are an underused resource for expanding the reach of select public health interventions. Especially in developing countries, pharmacies are often a primary source of services; thus, pharmacy staffs are in a good position to help their clients with reproductive health needs, such as emergency contraception, STI risk assessment and referral, and ongoing use of contraception.
Pharmacies are particularly appealing to youth, who frequently avoid the formal health system because of the stigma attached to those who are sexually active and unmarried. Pharmacies offer convenience, affordability, relative anonymity, and greater availability of reproductive health supplies.
Building capacity With the RxGen project, PATH built the capacity of pharmacists and their staff to provide quality reproductive health information and services, especially to youth. We implemented activities in four countries: Cambodia, Kenya, Nicaragua, and Vietnam.”


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Historically, the role of pharmacists in public health has not been well defined. Population-based service was and continues to be less common than individual-based service, in part due to the lack of training for pharmacists to hold these positions and limited pharmacist role models who provide population-based care. The reality of things is that there is now more attention to population-based service, as the world is shifting away from curative healthcare to the more pragmatic preventive health care.

Pharmacist participation at both levels of public health is important to promote and define the role of the public health pharmacist. The absence of public health education in curricula at colleges of pharmacy sharply contrasts with that offered by colleges of medicine, most of which have a community medicine department devoted to community public health service. While pharmacists have known public health responsibilities, colleges of pharmacy have not specifically addressed the need to train pharmacy students to perform these tasks until now.

Those colleges are still in deep slumber, with the University of Nairobi taking the lead. Does the Faculty of Pharmacy take even a few minutes to think of the world they are churning their graduates to or they are just sitting tight fighting their tiny battles of who is the dean and who is not? A friend doing Masters of Pharmacy (Clinical Pharmacy) recently confided in me there is a unit in her course called ‘Clinical Chemistry’ but a Pharmaceutical Chemistry lecturer walked in and started mumbling something about chromatography. The students, who had already worked in the real world, had to kick out this so called lecturer, for the embarrassment. There will be more embarrassments along the way when somebody walks in to talk about X-ray diffraction in a public health class, I tell you!

It does not matter how much confusion we have locally, but public health is the next frontier in pharmacy. No one cares nowadays how good you are as an individual or to an individual patient. It is good but it is never enough. It never takes you far. The meaningful thing that you do to the larger society is the only thing that will liberate you from the bondage of irrelevance. A plus here is being a public health consultant will force a pharmacist to talk, a virtue that is almost non-existent in pharmacy. When you talk others are bound to listen, and the benefits of that talk will trickle in to the more traditional practitioners in their pharmacies and offices.

Guys, any one of you who wants to make the big move!