Minister of Health kicks off Pharmaceutical Care Conference

Muscat: The three-day 8th Pharmaceutical Care Conference started yesterday at the Oman Exhibition & Conferences 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.
Thirty-nine local and international working papers will be presented in the conference, in addition to 17 pharmaceutical and health workshops, eight plenary sessions, besides displaying 29 scientific posters prepared by practitioners and students.
The inauguration ceremony included a welcome speech delivered by Nussaiba Habib Mohammed, Director General of the Directorate General of Medical Supplies (DGMS) in which she said that 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 randomized clinical trial with 1467 participants receiving at least five medications.
The 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 emphasized in his speech on the need of institutions for training programs, adding that training is a systematic process through which an organization’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.