Pharmacists have been warned against breaking on the ethics of the profession. According to the Registrar, Pharmacists Council of Nigeria (PCN), Mr. Elijah Mohammed, any errant pharmacist would be punished.
Such defaulting pharmacists will be made to face PCN’s disciplinary committee and sanctioned, if found guilty.
Mohammed told rporters in Lagos: “The system is faced with moral and ethical crisis arising from decades of neglect, disobedience and passivity by many which have produced a culture ofpharmacy practice that lacks self-actualisation, control and the true commitment to the ethics of the profession. The system is bedeviled with landmark legislation and executive recklessness, a situation that has assumed illegality on demand and removed the essence of pharmacy practice from the public arena.”
He likened the system to, “the Nollywood industry with all shades of actors acting various scripts to suit a hodgepodge of producers and directors alike. The pharmacy practice has long suffered from a generational gap with little genuine appreciation, understanding and co-operation between the older and younger generations of practitioners.”
Mohammed said there was the need to bring together these generations to infuse them with common vision, a unified sense of purpose and recognition of their mutual independence. “These generations moving together towards a shared goal, can accomplish more than each of them could achieve separately. What it would take to lose everything was for one generation to fail in transferring its beliefs and principles to the next. The consequence of this was for the practice standing now at crossroads where it either turns back to the god of pharmacy, for redemption or face greater deterioration and ultimately self-extinction,” he stated.
“We are going to move from transactional to transformational leadership structure in the system. Transformation leadership, occurs when all concerned subscribe to the core values of integrity, honesty, dedication and transformation. Revolution rarely begins suddenly. Instead, it grows over time as people become less satisfied with the conditions as they are. One incidence will lead to another and tension mounts until finally catalytic event becomes the flash point that propels them into action”.
He said: “These critical times call for radical response from people of conscience. Traditional means, methods and modes of thoughts and actions, are insufficient to meet the needs of the present hour. A more drastic approach, therefore, is required. In every generation, people of conscience usually come forth from within to bring about a change for good. These people are men and women who are satisfied with nothing less than undivided devotion to the good of humanity, uncompromising obedience to the will of doing what is right and an unflinching engagement with a culture that is hostile to all things of good conscience”.
The Registrar said there is a need for result-oriented regulation, monitoring and controlling activities for all aspect of pharmacy practice in Nigeria including the education and training of pharmacists and pharmacy-related personnel through the use of highly motivated officials, backed with adequate logistics and cutting-edge technology.
‘As a professional body’, he asked rhetorically, “must we wait for this to happen before we know that things must change for good?
Mohammed lamented that, “The pharmacy profession and indeed the nation has watched, mostly in silence, as the voice of reasoning and the laws of the practice have been progressively legislated out of the public arena just as the gladiators worship at the altar of greed, materialism and selfishness to perpetuate the malevolent deeds. My mission is a revolution devoid of violence and destruction but of love, professional sanctification and radical devotion to what is good that can bring the pharmacy community out of the woods. This is only achievable through a process of self and systemic transformation and actualisation.
“The way forward, is for the system to create the opportunity for self-transformation through training and re-training, education and mass enlightenment campaign. That, is the only way to elicit the spirit of self-conviction and embedment of the mentality of ‘what must we do to be saved, the passion for and to do good for humanity which is the essence of the pharmacy practice’.
Other ways, he said, will be to motivate the people to solve problems through collective responsibility and empowerment rather than reinforcing the over-lordship of the state on citizens. He said:”We should see ourselves as a bridge generation that builds on the past, lives in the present and plans for the future”.
On his intention, Mohammed said: “I am here to rebuild the pharmacy practice, the civic office is too serious to be entrusted in the hands of charlatans, when serious people turned away from leadership roles, the field will be left to those who have nothing to offer than crass opportunism and damage to the people’s wellbeing. I call on all pharmacists to embrace the oath taken and abide by the ethics of the practice because there is no room for compromise again, under the new administration.”
The Chairman; Bruno Nwakwo, said all fields of pharmaceutical practice will be visited and regulated, “we are in the business of healing through medicines. So let all pharmacists, especially in the clinical and community practices, cross check prescription brought to them by patients, so that wrong prescriptions can be tracked and patients saved.”
