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Clinical Pharmacy in Ethiopia: an experience based literature review
Abstract
Understanding the global changes, in 2008, the curriculum was focused towards clinical pharmacy in Ethiopia. To better explain the clinical pharmacy education, practice, and research in Ethiopia, this review was nurtured with my experience at the University of Gondar. The dynamic mutual partnership between Addis Ababa University (AAU) and Howard University, United States of America had resulted in developing clinically-oriented pharmacy curriculum in Ethiopia. Successively, in the year 2015, University of Gondar (UOG) became the second university to launch postgraduate clinical pharmacy program. Clinical pharmacy education in UOG is continuously starving to produce global standard clinical pharmacy workforce. In addition, almost 300 pharmacists and other health workers were trained in providing drug information through drug information center (DIC) and eight satellite DICs were established in various public universities. In UOG hospital, the DIC was established in December 2012. Ethiopia has standard operation procedures (SOP) for pharmacists’ provision of clinical pharmacy services to standardize the practice in all hospitals. Further, of a total of 234 research items identified in Pubmed and nearly half of them (101 papers) were published by clinical pharmacy faculties of UOG. All these indicates, clinical pharmacy in Ethiopia is highly accepted and UOG faculties remained exceptional in terms of quality of education, services, and competent research works. International organizations and institutions should come forward to strengthen and boost clinical pharmacy profession in Ethiopia.
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References
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