The immediate past President of PSN Alhaji Ahmed Yakassai has given the outgoing executives led by him a pass mark. Yakasaai submitted that his team have lived up to the promises upon which they took office.

He made this known at the 91st conference of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria, PSN tagged “Innovative Disruption in Pharmacy in Emerging Economies: A Roadmap for Nigeria”, in Ibadan.

"I was given the mandate to lead as President of PSN- the oldest and the most organized professional body in Nigeria- at the 88th annual conference in Abuja. It was this trust that gave me the courage and strength to dedicate my life to the service of our humble society. My mission was to strengthen the pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria with cooperative, participatory, responsive and transparent leadership."

He expressed happiness that PSN championed the course of improving the health care delivery system in Nigeria. He added that his leadership made updating and improving the element of PSN, running an accountable and transparent organization, creating an efficient and responsive forum a priority.

"I don't want to sound immodest or unnecessarily blow our trumpets but I must say we have kept our promises. We have served our noble profession with our body, mind and soul. I have sacrificed my time, businesses and purpose to justify the confidence reposed in me to lead our society."

He also highlighted some of the things achieved by the PSN during his tenure like the the reclaiming of the PSN Victoria Island property; launching of Medicine Information Centre licensed by the UK Medicine

Information Centre to provide pharmaceutical information to healthcare providers; inauguration of the PSN narcotics and drug abuse committee among others.

According to him, "I made deliberate strategic efforts to buld partnership among our technical groups towards professional and national development to demonstrate that pharmacists can make the country proud by looking inwards to produce medicine for our people."

Meanwhile the President of Healthcare Federation of Nigeria and MD JNC Int’l Ltd Clare Omatseye has emphasized on the need for innovative disruption for a more robust and efficient health care delivery system.

Delivering the key note address at the 91st PSN conference, Omatseye said, “Today the number of doctors, pharmacists and nurses to patients is extremely low, we need to think of ways to use technology to close that

gap. We need to look at the supply chain, how do we get essential drugs faster to our patients.

“Technology is moving ahead, are we as pharmacists moving with improving technology? Innovative disruption is doing things that enhance the way we do things today. So technology presents opportunities for enhanced efficiency.

“Banking, telecommunications industries and others have since embraced technology to improve operations. When we talk about commerce, we have so many online stores today where you can order items online and get it delivered. The pharmaceutical industry cannot afford to left behind. It needs to be able to deliver quality assured, affordable, accessible essential medicines.”

Omatseye challenged key players in the health sector especially pharmacists to be distruptive in their thoughts by using the leverage of technology to become effective in procurement and supply chain management.

She opined that innovative financing of health care by placing taxes on luxury items should be looked into be the appropriate authorities as access to finance has been a major challenge.

“We need to distrupt the way healthcare is financed. One way we can do this is through ‘Domestic Resource Mobilization’, where we can all decide to pay 1% tax on luxury goods like alcohol, cigarettes and sugary drinks. That could go into a healthcare fund.”

“Another thing we can look into is for every community pharmacists to have an interactive website that is mobile responsive where drugs can be bought online.”

Omatseye also highlighted the need for strategic collaborations to address the crisis in the health sector.

According to her, “As pharmacists we have a crisis because 70 to 80 per cent of our drugs are imported. The contribution of pharmacy to the whole GDP of the country is 0.74%, the contribution of pharmaceutical manufacturers to the total manufacturers in Nigeria is only 2.38% which is very appalling. Why this is so is because we import almost everything, the raw materials, the packaged materials, we also have high taxes on importation.

“There is a lot of inefficiencies in the system, therefore what we are doing right now is not going to work, we need to be able to disrupt the status quo. At the end of day government cannot do it alone. Government have the responsibility of providing access to health care to every

Nigerian but how many healthcare centres are working?

“So the truth is that public and private sectors have to come together through close cooperative and strategic partnership. Also inter-sectorial rivalry needs to be put to rest, pharmacists and doctors must be united because we have a common goal which is Nigerian patients.

“It cannot be business as usual, we need to understand the challenges affecting us and build strategic collaborations.”

She added that an investment of about $15billion is required to close the infrastructural gap existing between the pharmaceutical industry in the country and those of countries like India

She said, “We need close to $10billion to $15billion to close the infrastructure gap, this cannot be done overnight. We need good governance, we need to look at cooperate social responsibilities, get rid of corruption.”

She also lamented that only 3.8% of the consolidated revenue budget of the country goes to health care sector as against the 15% agreed upon at the Abuja declaration.