Happy World Pharmacy Day Respond -FIPOL
Safe Medicating in our communities September 25, 2019
On behalf of the professionals we want thank our patients, healthcare teams, management, consumers, individuals and institutions for the kind words directed to pharmacists.
These words strengthen our commitment to provide safe and effective medicines for all. These comments are motivating.
GSK Australia
Happy World Pharmacist Day! Celebrating the role of pharmacists in delivering safe and effective medicines to the community. #WPD2019.
Thanks, pharmacists, for your crucial role in ensuring the safe and effective use of medicines. #worldpharmacistsday #WPD2019.
-Thank you to all the pharmacists out there for doing an amazing job! You inspire us every single day! https://www.rpharms.com/recognition/wearepharmacy
-Thanks to thousands of pharmacists across Europe, Europeans can get e-prescriptions in other countries as part of the #eHealth Digital Service Infrastructure provided by the EU
The theme of this year's World Pharmacists Day, September 25, is \"Safe and effective medicines for all,\" according to the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP). The theme aims to highlight the key role that pharmacists play in protecting patient safety through improved medicine use and reduced medication errors.
Comments on this day included:
-Cannot imagine patients without doctors and medicines without a pharmacist. Happy world Pharmacists day.
-Pharmacists are an integral part of the critical care staff ensuring the patient's safety. Happy Pharmacists Day.
-Pharmacists are our trusted source of knowledge, advice, and help. Happy World Pharmacists Day.
-Pharmacists are a trusted source of knowledge and advice, not only for patients but for many healthcare professionals. Happy World Pharmacists day.
-This is a great time to showcase what community pharmacists can do for their patients. World Pharmacist Day.
-Pharmacists promote a healthier world through patient care, research, teaching, and the pharmaceutical industry. World Pharmacist Day.
-Pharmacists are basic for safe, effective use of medicines. I am inspired by their dedication and passion for enhancing health all over the world.
-Happy World Pharmacist Day. We research, develop new medicines, educate future pharmacists and people in service to the patients.
We thank you all for these kind words.
The Foundation for Improving Pharmaceutical Outcomes in Liberia continues to address the ongoing problem of substandard and falsified medical products and their consequences. We are aware that these products cause significant threats to health, increased disease prevalence, loss of public confidence in healthcare professionals and health systems, among many negating factors.
The pharmacists are well positioned to identify these problem products and must have the knowledge to identify and be empowered to report these products to the requisite regulatory institution. Our institutions must be enabled to remove these substandard and falsified products from our healthcare system and communities.
In our communities or cities, the sale of medicinal products is done openly at markets, street corners and at unregulated locations. The altered medical product has a substantial negative impact on public health. These suspected substandard or falsified products can lead to
serious adverse reactions or no therapeutic response. These products have significant socioeconomic and economic impacts including increased out-of-pocket spending, lost productivity, lost income and increased poverty.
The challenge out there goes to every individual of the community but the specialist (Pharmacist) have got to set the pace. The public-private drive to get you involve will serve as an accelerator in getting community members improve the decision of supporting the non-standard unregulated market in the community you serve.
FIPOL is carrying on a volunteer/member drive to strengthen public and the private sector effort of protecting our communities from unsafe medication use.
Interested in joining or partnering with FIPOL:
-visit fipol.net to fill in either section of JOIN US or PARTNERSHIP
Special interest groups are created to facilitate interactions among those with interests in specialized areas of activity within the practice.
You can submit inquiries to jkaiwood1@gmail.com
Released: September 26th, 2019 12:56 AM Author: Joseph Kaiwood Email: jkaiwood1@gmail.com
The proposal to convene the gathering of pharmaceutical educators, distributors, dispensers; business owners, hospitals, clinics along with regulators and the ministry of health is about developing strategies that will tackle the provision of essential medicines in providing universal coverage.
We are presently seeking partnership in convening a five-day workshop/meeting in Liberia, for the purpose of developing strategies that will transform processes for improving Pharmaceutical outcomes in Liberia. It could be theme as "Empowering the local Communities" or "Strategizing for Medical Supplies in Providing Universal Coverage". Suggestions are entertained.
The progress obtained in moving communities improving pharmaceutical outcomes is gradual, but the funding sources are not convinced that this trend could easily bring about the end to relying on foreign assistance. Many minds point to transforming present methods so that there is a huge sense of accountability and responsibility for decisions and actions.
The USAID insertion in this call is enforced by the present administration of the agency.
The private sector is an inextricable stakeholder in driving and sustaining outcomes capable of moving countries beyond the need for assistance. Today, the private sector is playing an unprecedented role in creating and shaping opportunities that improve the lives of the people and communities USAID supports.
The private sector in the developing world provides an important pathway to self-reliance. It is the driving force behind new innovations that solve problems. It brings expertise to building local markets that match local savings with investment opportunities and provide countries with the tools to finance their own development. The private sector has the scale and resources to match the complexity of challenges countries face on their Journey to Self-Reliance.
Proposing workshops, gathering, meetings and discussions on making the optimistic changes should be welcome in moving the process forward. We have had these gatherings but with little or no ownership role played by private sector ideas.
We at the foundation for improving pharmaceutical outcomes in Liberia agreed that each country must lead its own Journey to Self-Reliance, defined as its ability to plan, finance, and implement solutions to its own development challenges.
Addressing challenges should not always be a proposal of government but a call that could come from the private sector as well. The trained professionals, investors, former officials, consumers of services and products; we all have got a part in this pie. The inclusion of all sectors should accelerate the path to self-reliance.
As we engage and seek opportunities for becoming self-sustaining; strategies for building the requisite skills, resources, knowledge, local institutions, and incentives that enable local systems and markets can better become accommodating with the involvement of public-private collaboration.
I thought it wise to bring in Ambassador Mark Green's message on the new policy on private-sector engagement. Mark Green is the Administrator of the United states Agency for International development (USAID).
The message:
I am pleased to share with you our new policy on private-sector engagement. This policy comes at an exciting time in which leaders in both the public and private sectors are figuring out how to take the unique capabilities of each and apply them to problems that neither could address fully on their own. This engagement can make addressing challenges that once seemed insurmountable very real and achievable.
Private-sector engagement is fundamental to our goal to end the need for foreign assistance. This policy is a call to action for staff from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and our partners to embrace market-based approaches as a more-sustainable way to support communities in achieving development and humanitarian outcomes at scale. This is based on our premise that private enterprise is one of the most-powerful forces for lifting lives, strengthening communities, and accelerating countries to self-reliance.
I believe the future of international development is enterprise-driven. Enterprise-driven development means aligning with private enterprises as co-creators of market-oriented solutions, with shared risk and shared reward. It means recognizing the value of engaging the private sector in development and humanitarian assistance to help shape solutions that achieve sustained impact and can carry forward long after USAID's support has ended and reorienting our investments to open markets for U.S. firms.
Implementing this policy will require a major cultural and operational transformation in the way USAID and our partners work. We must commit to deepening our collaboration with the private sector in seeking market-based approaches across all areas of our work, from economic growth, power, agriculture, and global health to humanitarian assistance, women's empowerment, education, and addressing crisis and conflict.
steering, more than rowing, in an effort to create a force-multiplier that will allow us to work together with the private sector to achieve greater impact than either of us could achieve alone.
Ultimately, increasing our collaboration with the private sector across all areas of our work will make us better development and humanitarian professionals, bring us closer to our purpose of ending the need for foreign assistance, and provide greater opportunities for American Business.
Released: December 30th, 2018 06:11 PM Author: Joseph Kaiwood Email: jkaiwood1@gmail.com
These articles remind us on why there is the need to revisit strategies being implemented continuously. Our assessments of ongoing or completed processes should not rest with the providers alone but the consumers of the services we provide.
Framing an agenda for children thriving in the SDG era:
WHO, UNICEF, Lancet
Commission on Child Health and Wellbeing.
Awa Coll-Seck, Helen Clark, Rajiv Bahl, Stefan Peterson, Anthony Costello, Tamara Lucas
The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) era witnessed an unprecedented drop in mortality among children
younger than 5 years and in undernutrition across all regions. However, the poorest children remain 179
times more likely than others to die before reaching the age of 5 years.
If these child mortality trends persist, the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) child mortality targets
(reducing neonatal mortality to at least as low as 12 per 1000 livebirths and under-5 mortality to at least
as
low as 25 per 1000 livebirths in all countries by 2030) will not be met in 47 countries, 34 of which are in
sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, undernutrition is prevalent in some regions, with an estimated 151 million
children affected by stunting worldwide.
This situation is further complicated by burgeoning overnutrition together with vitamin and mineral deficiency in early childhood and their links to adult non-communicable diseases. Reversing current trajectories requires not only applying lessons learned from the MDG era but also addressing all the determinants of child health and wellbeing that will impact whether today's children achieve their maximum potential in every situation. Indeed, evidence shows that about 50% of the reduction in child mortality in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) between 1990 and 2010 was due to indirect influences beyond the health sector.
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32821-6/fulltext
Released: November 02nd, 2018 09:56 AM Author: Awa Coll-Seck Helen Clark Rajiv Bahl Stefan Peterson Anthony Costello Tamara Lucas Website: The Lancet Journal
By --Joseph Kaiwood
The task of universal coverage includes the provision of effective and quality pharmaceutical products that can strengthen the health programs that consumers and community members can access.
Countries including Liberia are transitioning their health care programs to establish a process that will meet the needed guidelines advocating for the provision of universal coverage. Access to medicines is vital to the health care programs of this country and many more.
International bodies are in support of efforts that will strengthen the access to medicines and many more, but the individual communities and institutions must get involved in strengthening their health programs. Years, projects, and administrations come and go, but the identical situation presented as problems continue to resurface. The status of the national drug service, the supply chain bottlenecks, substandard pharmaceutical products on the market, the sale of pharmaceuticals through non-standard markets and many more continue to infect the image of the health program in Liberia.
We could have made some progress but are we making efforts to sustain the progress made and bring on board those areas dragging behind?
Instead of looking to government systems alone to provide the solution to all these tasks ahead, we at FIPOL have come to realized that the professionals, the managers of the pharmaceutical programs both public and private has got to address these concerns as individuals and communities wanting to see a clear path to self-reliance and providing access to medicines.
There could be alternate plans that will strengthen this sector of the health program in most developing countries like Liberia. The options for this country start with involving the partakers or stakeholders into a continuous monitoring and evaluation of the path selected. The collaboration should consider the efforts made by private sector health programs both the for-profit and the not- for- profit.
We have big plans and dreams that tend to die down when it passes out with a single implementer. The results of these plans can contribute to the discussion of the future thereby noting the importance of every idea. The solutions to the problems are within reach of the communities.
Government continues to welcome processes that will build the capacity of each health care program including pharmaceutical system governance, building institutional and human resource capacity for management and services, financing and resource allocation, gathering of information for decision making process and patient centered services.
We want to make sure our communities have equitable and sustainable access to safe, effective, quality confirmed, and affordable essential medicines and pharmaceutical services. The medium through which we can address situation of bad governance, the path to improving and of course the ideas that will make our system accountable.
The community citizen wants to have access to the needed medicines that will cure or bring in the desired relief. Individuals were trained for this purpose, for the provision of the services that should be rendered. We can develop models worth emulating by engaging this process with the cultural shift in the direction of owning the problems thus strengthening the process of accountability.
The purpose of this foundation is to link resources with the service providers, but we want to assure both parties of transparency, and the hope for improved outcomes. The plead and messages will continue in subsequent sharing.
Let us discuss the pharmaceutical component of the health package of Liberia. Thanks for riding with me through the hint of universal coverage, health supplies matters and the commitment to find solution.
Released: September 24th, 2015 06:10 PM
Author: Joseph Kaiwood
Tuberculosis is a major killer and will remain so without considerable changes. Recent UN meetings are vu all over again.
Progress has been slow. Global tuberculosis incidence has been stagnant for decades at around 2%, despite assurances that the recommended tuberculosis strategy would accelerate its decline. Case detection is also stuck at 64%, only a marginal change from 42% in 2000. Over a third of tuberculosis cases are never diagnosed, causing millions of preventable deaths and new infections in families and communities.
Control of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is also failing. In 1996 WHO stated that MDR-tuberculosis is too expensive to treat in poor countries; it detracts attention and resources from treating drug-susceptible cases. Faith in directly observed treatment, short course (DOTS) slowly eroded, because leaving people with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis untreated was increasingly recognized as being both unethical and a bad tuberculosis control strategy. However, in the decades that followed, there has only been minimal progress in preventing, finding, and successfully treating new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. In 2008, 29,2008423 (7%) of an estimated 440,2008000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis were treated with a 60% treatment success, translating into a 4% treatment success for all estimated cases of multidrug resistant tuberculosis that year. In 2017, 139,2008114 (30%) of 457,2008560 estimated global cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis were treated with a 55% treatment success, translating into a 17% treatment success for all estimated cases that year. Although overall treatment success is rising about 174% per year from 2008, this can hardly be called a successful response.
Announcing that tuberculosis has now surpassed other lethal infectious disease, leadership blames insufficient investment and cites a growing US$375 billion annual resource gap for global tuberculosis control. From 2003 to 2017, $43 billion were budgeted by international and domestic sources for control of tuberculosis and HIV-associated tuberculosis (appendix).5 Resource allocation data are scarce, so past investments are difficult to match with their effect on service delivery and health. For example, serious doubts remain about the impact of investing millions of dollars to deploy the Xpert MTB/RIF assay to diagnose tuberculosis and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in endemic countries.6 It is also very difficult to know with certainty what proportion of resources are being used to provide direct services to people with tuberculosis.
Budgeting for ambitious targets makes sense and is necessary to successfully tackle tuberculosis control. However, calling for increased funding for a poorly performing disease control strategy is never easy. Requests for funding should be based on new strategies that review available resources and past returns on investments. There are many hard questions to be asked about strategy, leadership, and longstanding inefficiencies, including wasteful meetings, redundant international organizations, and antiquated, ineffective service delivery. Asking tough questions should not be seen as an attack; it is essential to rapidly learn from past failures and course correct to ensure increased funding and the success of robust tuberculosis control efforts.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32751-X
Released: November 01st, 2018 10:14 AM
Author: Reuben Granich
Website: The Lancet Journal