• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BusinessDay

‘Poor pharmaceutical care leads to half of treatment failures’

pharmaceutical

Abimbola Adebakin, the chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of Advantage Health Africa has said that poor pharmaceutical care is known to lead to half of the treatment failures, saying that availability, accessibility, and affordability of quality, safe and essential drugs are critical to the success of Nigeria’s healthcare delivery system – across all aspects of the value chain.

Speaking at the launching of MYPHARMACY in Lagos, Adebakin said that this desire to improve healthcare outcomes has prompted Nigeria’s fastest-growing pharmacy chain, to launch a value-based franchise chain, commencing with 50 pharmacy premises in several cities and towns.

According to him, we aim to empower, innovate, create access and accelerate growth in the franchise chain to revolutionise the country’s healthcare sector.

“We are targeting a significant improvement in healthcare outcomes for Nigerians. Besides providing a collaborative platform between different pharmacies – to build a strong chain of independently owned pharmacies, other perks of belonging to the chain include; cost reduction through bulk purchasing of goods and services, business reliability improvement with standards and controls, increased revenue in leaps that independents cannot achieve singly,” said Adebakin.

Meanwhile, the growth of pharmacy businesses at the last mile, where essential healthcare is rendered, has been somewhat stunted over the years. This problem, largely based on their inability to remain financially afloat and differentiate their service offering, has forced several pharmacies out of operations.

Data has shown that over 50 percent of pharmacies close down businesses in the first five years, inevitably posing an objection to the overall growth of the country’s healthcare sector. The competitive landscape and ecosystem has also not helped to enable many independent pharmacies to thrive. Regardless of the root causes, the need for urgent and scalable solutions are visible to all.

Adebakin, further said that the goal of the pharmacy is to bring together pharmacies with like-minded to work hand in hand to meet the pharmaceutical needs of Nigerians while growing businesses of economic value.

“This move will drive up the value proposition of independent pharmacies by building professional back-end processes on a performance basis.  we expect the chain plans to grow to an unprecedented 1000 pharmacies by the end of 2024,” she said.