Webinar: Advancing Community Pharmacy - Ghana

TRANSCRIPT

Dr Therestella Obosu Tei-Kwabla, Chief Executive Officer, Pacalin Pharmacy

“Hello, my name is Therestella Obosu Tei-Kwabla. I’m a Ghanaian, I’m a pharmacist, and I’m the CEO of Pacalin Pharmacy, which is a community retail pharmacy here in Ghana. What we do here is, when someone comes to our community pharmacy and tells us about his or her condition and we get to know that these are symptoms of malaria, we tell the person, ‘We would like to test you and confirm that indeed it’s malaria before we give you the treatment’. 

“We have something called the malaria diagnostic test strips. We tell them we will need a sample of blood. There’s two holes in our diagnostic strips that we have here available; we put the sample in the cassette, we get two lines on the cassette, then we know that the person is positive, so you would begin treatment.

“We go through a whole lot of steps after confirming the diagnosis, after our treatments, then we do the counselling so that the person is aware that ‘this’ and ‘this’ and ‘this’ is what would make you get the malaria again. It’s open to the general public. Whether you are a private community pharmacy, a government-operated community pharmacy, everyone is supposed to use it.

“We pharmacists mostly have what is called CPD [continuing professional development]. We come together to update ourselves when there is a need: all the pharmaceutical societies are on board, and they make sure that we are well informed, we are well trained to make sure we help in this way.

“For the community, mostly some people can’t afford it. Most of them don’t have the finances. When they come and they are telling you the symptoms, and you’re like ‘our charge is GH₵15,’ they’ll be like, ‘I can’t really afford. So thank you, I’ll go and think about it.’ That is a big challenge for us.

“Sometimes we go in our own ways to help out the community. When they come and they are in that situation, I do it for them for free. But you ask yourself, ‘How many people will do it for free here in Ghana?’ There isn’t that privilege or opportunity. It’s really a big problem because when it comes to malaria, when you don’t treat it, the side effects are unbearable. If we could get sponsorship, it will really save lives.

“It’s all about life. It’s all about helping people. You see, when you work in the community pharmacy [and] you are able to help someone, you get that feeling that you could do something to save someone’s life. This happiness is all so very critical and very important.”