Sunday, June 29, 2008

Week 5

Highlights of this week include visiting the WHO office in Suva city. The pharmacist there Lakghva gave an interesting insight into the role of WHO in providing technical pharmaceutical assistance to the Pacific Island countries. WHO Pacific Office promotes essential medicines, quality assurance of medications, rational use of medications and assistance with developing a National Medicines Policy to the Pacific. All of this aims to ensure timely, affordable, reliable access to safe medications that the population need for the priority health conditions. She discussed how recently Martial Islands are in the process of developing their National Medicines Policy, Tonga is conducting a Pharmaceutical assessment survey, Vanuatu is looking at the outer island nursing posts to assess medication use, and the Solomon Islands are conducting a national workshop of antimicrobial use. It's fascinating how so much is going on in the Pacific and also very exciting. It's also a big job for Lakghva to co-ordinate all of these projects and arrange for all the visiting consultants who help these small countries.

CWM hospital arranged a morning tea for me on Thursday which was lovely! There were about 25 people (about 7 2nd year pharmacy students also) and I used this opportunity to hand over a donation from Remedy. Remedy is a group of students at Victorian College of Pharmacy who aim to share pharmacy resources with developing nations, and promote awareness of the sorts of issues that developing countries face. Before I came to Fiji, I was aware that the major divisional hospitals in Fjii were in need of reference texts such as paediatric pharmacopoeias and drugs in pregnancy/breastfeeding guidelines. Remedy kindly sponsored the provision of 3 paediatric pharmacopeias and 4 drugs in pregnancy/drugs in breastfeeding guidelines to be distributed throughout Fiji's divisional hospitals. They were very happy to recieve the books and expressed their sincere gratitude to Remedy for the donation. So I know the books will come to good use here.

My report is in it's final stages and it has turned out quite well. My recommendations and findings I will present to FPBS this Wednesday. I will try to upload a final version of my report. Diabetes is such a big problem here and it was a very interesting topic for me to research, I really enjoyed it!

It is my last week in Fiji! It is so sad because I really love this country and will miss the friendly, kind, resilient people that have surrounded me every day.

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