MUSCAT: The 3-day 8th Pharmaceutical Care Conference started on Monday at the Oman Convention and Exhibition Centre under the patronage of Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed al Saeedi, Minister of Health.
The conference aims at enhancing the values of scientific research, creativity and innovation in the field of pharmacy, in addition to exchanging scientific experiences among its participants, and building a generation of researchers to develop the practice of pharmaceutical
care profession in community pharmacies.
39 local and international working papers will be presented in the conference, in addition to 17 pharmaceutical and health workshops, 8 plenary sessions, besides displaying 29 scientific posters prepared by practitioners and students.
Ph Nussaiba Habib Mohammed, Director-General of the Directorate-General of Medical Supplies (DGMS) who delivered the welcome speech during the inauguration ceremony, said this year’s conference is held under the theme ‘Towards Professional Excellence in Pharmacy Practices’’, pointing that the conference is an extension of the previous conferences in order to open new horizons for scientific and professional interaction with a distinguished elite of experts, researchers and pharmacists.
She said that the next stage requires concerted efforts of all sectors and categories of the health system to confirm their vital role in the comprehensive national health policy, noting that the conference will include many lectures, workshops and plenary sessions with local and international participation.
She stated that the Ministry of Health (MoH) has adopted a strategy of Pharmaceutical Safety Programmes to control, reduce, spot and follow up pharmaceutical errors, and established plans and strategies to mitigate adverse drug events, by understanding the mechanism of error and way to prevent in well thought scientific procedures to ensure achieving pharmaceutical safety and medication error prevention before reaching to the patient.
Sylvia Hyland, Vice-President and Chief of Operating Officer at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), Canada, said in her speech that the Sultanate inaugurated the Third Global Patient Safety Challenge in September 2017 to reduce the level of severe, avoidable harm related to medications by 50 per cent over 5 years.
She added that the pharmacist intervention has statistically reduced average rate of readmissions according to the randomised clinical trial with 1,467 participants receiving at least five medications.
She also said that the pharmacists’ roles have changed over the years, with more emphasis on transferring knowledge, stressing that pharmacists certainly have the most training in terms of dealing with drug interactions.
Prof Saleh BaWazir, Professor of Clinical Pharmacy and the Chairman of BaWazir Pharma Consulting Center, KSA, in his speech emphasised the need of institutions for training programmes, adding that training is a systematic process through which an organisation’s human resources gain knowledge and develop skills by instruction and practical activities that result in improved organisation performance.
At the end of the ceremony, the Health Minister honoured those who won the title of distinguished pharmacists and the speakers in the conference. He also visited the accompanying exhibition of the most important local and international medication manufacturing companies, as well as pharmacy sector institutions. — ONA
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