By Yvonne Atilego
Minister of Health Kwaku Agyemang Manu has expressed worry about pharmacies that are dispensing medications without prescription. According to him, medicines which are categorized under ‘prescription only’ should be adhered to strictly in order not to endanger the lives of patients.
The Minister expressed the worry when he inaugurated a nine-member Governing Board of the Pharmacy Council in Accra.
He tasked the Pharmacy Council to step up its monitoring and crack the whip on Pharmacies that engage in selling medications without prescription.
The Health Minister also tasked the Pharmacy Council to deal with peddlers of fake medicines.
”You are the professionals, who are practicing in Communities when students come with letters from their Universities for internship and you will get them. How well to train a lot of people to take over your own profession to build capacity in your profession”.
”There is some advocacy on public perception….I keep on saying advocacy, advocacy this position only makes sense when me and you could have been on radio every morning and shouting that if you don’t have a prescription don’t go to buy and if you are selling and someone comes without prescription don’t give”.
”If you are doing your monitoring very well and you are sending intelligent people to go out to those who have license and are still dispensing POM without hydraulics prescription you close their shops so that there will be sanity in the system. When it comes to medicine I get scared about the types of abuses we have, they impact directly on our health”, the Health Minister posited.
Chairperson of the newly inaugurated Governing Board of the Pharmacy Council, Doris Fosu Hemaa Addae expressed the Board’s resolve to implement policies and laws regulating Pharmacies and other medicine peddlers.
