Digital age offers great opportunities to pharmacists – Prof Dodoo

Professor Alex Dodoo, the Director-General of the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA), said the digital age offers pharmacists great opportunity and they need to accept the challenge to improve healthcare delivery in the country.

He said digitisation gave immense power and provided ample opportunities to pharmacists that humanity had not leveraged.

He said robotics and artificial intelligence were being deployed in all spheres and pharmacists should not be left out as they must use those tools to make them more relevant in the healthcare delivery system.

Prof Dodoo said this at the first White Coat Ceremony for students of the School of Pharmacy, University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS) in Ho on the theme: “The Dynamics of the Pharmacists in A Digital Age.”

He said pharmacists were using technology such as drones to distribute medicines and other life-saving products to hard-to-navigate terrains and those technologies could only make contemporary pharmacists to excel.

“As we expand on the ethics, values of the profession should expand, while we maintain standards and exploit opportunities,” Prof Dodoo said.

He urged the students to be guided by the Oaths they had sworn and live up to the expectations of respect and respectability and avoid exploiting, oppressing and lauding it over the unsuspecting community within which they would be working.

Professor Theophilus C. Fleischer, the Dean of the School of Pharmacy, said the student population had grown to 204 from the pioneering 31 in 2016, with their programmes accredited by the Pharmacy Council and the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC).

He said plans were are afoot to start a postgraduate training in the pharmaceutical sciences.

Prof Fleischer cautioned the students to avoid complacency at this stage of their academic progression of becoming pharmacists but continue to work hard and adopt the right attitudes towards achieving their goals.

The White Coat ceremony marks a new phase of their training, sometimes referred to as clinical or professional pharmacy education phase, which symbolised a period of professionalism and competence, he said.

Prof John Gyapong, the Vice Chancellor of UHAS, who presided, said the norms and values that shaped the Ghanaian mentality had been lost and “we are now in an arena of almost no values.”

He suggested a crusade to re-awaken the values and norms for quality lifestyles through a national psychic programme towards nation building.

Prof Gyapong commended the students for a fight well-fought and urged them to be guided by the values and ethos of UHAS to shape their profession beyond the University.

He commended Prof Fleischer for his personal tenacity and commitment that had improved the lot of the School of Pharmacy.

Mr Bartholomew Ayimbire, the Class representative of the group, said they had surmounted challenges of lack of school infrastructure as classes were started in an incubation facility but were grateful a multi-purpose school had been completed for the School currently.

They pledged to uphold the tenets of the profession and move it to the next level backed by digital technology.

The students were donned with the White Coat and took the Oath of Professionalism.

In a related development, a tape was cut and a plaque unveiled to symbolise the completion of the new School of Pharmacy, at a cost of GH₵3.2 million.