The Registrar of the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria (PCN), Pharm. Babashehu Ahmed, has disclosed that the council has delisted three foreign institutions over poor performance of graduates from their institutions.

Ahmed disclosed this at a media interaction on PCN Act 2022 signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari, in Abuja.

Ahmed said: ”We have recognised that we have some challenges from some of our foreign universities bringing in pharmacists.

“We have presented memos to appropriate committees of the council and currently we have delisted three foreign universities because of the poor performance of graduates of those universities and we have also written those institutions because that is the foundation”.

“We have delisted three; two from Cameroon and one from Togo. We are also looking at some others coming from the Middle East. We have commenced our investigations to ensure they actually have what it takes to train pharmacists, otherwise, we take the same step”

Explaining the motive behind the PCN Act 2022, Ahmed said: “It is not something that the Council just put together either for the benefit of the institution or something that we just put together to strengthen the organisation by ourselves”.

“Rather, it is something that is a product of extensive participation, engagement and very importantly, concerns by every Nigerian that has something to put on the table in terms of improvements of the pharmacy regulation and with all these hands together, we now came about this particular document which I think is going to greatly improved pharmacy regulation in Nigeria”.

Ahmed further disclosed that the Registrar exclusively have the power to revoke the licences of the practitioners as well as facilities with this.

“We are now properly positioned to ensure that the minimum benchmark is actually adhered to. Also, one of the key empowerment of the office of the registrar is the fact that the foundation of the profession is training and these are the faculties we all went through to be trained as Pharmacists.

“Before now, we had the admission quota is something that has been opened and though there were some complaints to what we can call admission quota”.

“We also have a situation where there were breaches now, it is mandatory for every institution’s training pharmacist to by way of indexing presented to the registrar the number that you are bringing on board because that is the number that the council have due to limitations base on the facilities available for training that the council has put in place as approved admission quota”.

“Anything beyond that will not acceptable. This is putting in place a quality control mechanism to ensure that institutions only trained the number of professionals they have the capacity to train such that we don’t have people coming out that will not have sufficient capacity to be able to deliver on the job as it were”.

“These are some of the new areas that have been brought in. The issues of revocation of licences both for professionals as well as the facilities also brings the Registrar as a member of the council, it now presents more the person who is in charge of day-to-day activities now grounded with information and he is now in a better position to contribute to the deliberations in council other than just taking minutes of the council”. (Nigerian Tribune: Text, excludes headline)

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