Originally published on The Kigalian
Rwanda is recognised among the leading countries worldwide on Universal Health Coverage; and this has been mostly driven by strong policies on access to primary health care, where health centers and district hospitals have been empowered to offer optimised primary health care.
Despite this, the public health sector has been criticised over the past few months for ineffectiveness in public hospitals and patients overcrowding the available workforce and regression in diseases prevalence — like the case of Malaria.
On another hand, the number of retail and community pharmacies have significantly increased. This, for me, is an untapped opportunity for a public-private partnership that is much need to make leaps in primary health care indicators and access to basic health services if community pharmacists were empowered enough.
Beyond the popular belief that the role of a pharmacist is limited to selling drugs, their knowledge and skills in delivering clinical services and primary health care — on which they are trained — remains untapped. Pharmacists could easily relieve the public health sector of certain burdens.
Israel's blog 