A MODERN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM is built around a troika of professionals - doctors, nurses and pharmacists. Doctors diagnose diseases, interpret various tests, including X-rays, and perform operations; nurses offer pre, post, and long-term care of patients, often nursing them back to life; pharmacists dispense an array of medicines which, with each passing day, become more chemically complicated and technical in how they need to be handled.
As reported in this newspaper, there is an acute shortage of pharmacists in the Jamaican public health system, so much so that five government pharmacies in the Corporate Area have had to be closed. The Ministry of Health has been quietly recruiting pharmacists from Cuba to alleviate a situation that now seems to be at crisis level, but this has been described as a 'drop in the bucket'. The Northeast Regional Health Authority's Establishment is short of 23 pharmacists and 19 technicians. The Southeastern Authority needs at least another 5 pharmacists and the Southeast Authority needs a quota boost of about 50 per cent.
Even as pharmacies in the public sector are experiencing difficulties, there seems to be a consolidation of private sector pharmacies, replicating the operation of 'discount chains', such as Eckerd and CVS pharmacies in Florida. This may account for some of the migration of pharmacists from the public to the private sector, where salaries and employee benefits are more attractive.
It takes four years to train a pharmacist. If the present shortage had been anticipated, as it should have been, plans could have been put in place to improve the supply of these essential professionals. As it is, we are back to crisis management and the likelihood that poor Jamaicans who cannot afford medicines at private pharmacies will be at risk of delayed treatment, and even death.
In the long-term, Government is going to have to set a more realistic pay scale for pharmacists who, like teachers, average between $350,000 and $450,000 per annum. In the meantime, more pharmacists may have to be recruited from Cuba and other countries. Whatever it takes, the public has a right to expect that government pharmacies will be properly staffed with an acceptable inventory level of drugs properly dispensed.
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