Pharmacy Council emphasises importance of supply chain

The Pharmacy Council of Nigeria, PCN, and the African Centre for Supply Chain, ACSC, have noted that Nigeria is lagging behind and seems to pay little or no attention in the areas of supply chain and logistics.

PCN Registrar and Chief Executive Officer, CEO, Pharm Ibrahim Babashehu Ahmed, made the call in Abuja on Thursday alongside the experts from ACSC at the public presentation of the Nigerian Logistics and Supply Chain 2023 report.

The report covered the challenges within the space, ranging from manufacturing through distribution and important issues about patient access to medication.

Ahmed said the council, as the country’s regulatory body of the pharmaceutical sector, has been taking responsibility to situate itself appropriately within the supply chain space to ensure it is doing well and appropriately regulated for the benefit of the patients.

He said it was important that patients have access to quality and affordable medicines.

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He revealed that the current government is already taking steps to ensure that this particular endeavour is given attention, such that access to medicines by patients is well improved upon.

“We are doing everything possible to ensure that we achieve good implementation of the national drug distribution guideline, which is now taking us to the closure of open drug markets in the country.

“All these are aimed at streamlining the logistics, streamlining the distribution, and reducing access to medicines that, of course, are substandard because when the distribution chain is chaotic, anything and everything can go in and compete with the good ones; it also weakens the cell of the good ones, and then people, because of cost, end up patronising the low-quality ones and the substandard ones,” he said.

Also speaking, Professor A.G. Sumaila, the chairman of the Governing Council of ACSC, harped on the importance of logistics, adding that without it, nobody can survive.

“Supply chain logistics is life; without logistics, there is no life. And that’s the take-home. That’s your delivery—that without it, people cannot survive.

“Today. We are shouting about the prices of items going up; it is all logistic matters. That is what it means that without logistics we cannot survive,” he said.

The Director General of ACSC, Dr Obiora Madu, said that supply chain is no longer part of the system but the system in itself.

Harping on the lack of a supply chain, he said: “No matter what you do, even at home, manufacturing, or agriculture, everything will get grounded. Of course, even during COVID, the only thing that was moving around was the supply chain.”