The pharmacist's NGO: Compounding Drugs

The hospital recently got a visit from a potential partner, the Spanish-based NGO called Fundacion el Alto. The foundation works with hospitals in Africa to improve their pharmacy services. This includes the distribution of drugs through the hospital, records keeping, and also compounding of drugs in the hospital. This can be especially useful since many hospitals fall victim of counterfeit drugs or shortages. Using compounding, hospitals can order large quantities of raw materials and mix basic drugs themselves. The NGO focuses heavily on technical training and sustainability and has successful projects in Chad and Ethiopia.

We were informed the pharmacists would be coming down for one week to do a fact-finding mission and see if the hospital was interested in partnering with them. They are based in Valencia, which is very close to where the Grau Foundation is based, so they touched base with the board of the Grau Foundation and brought us down a care package of jamón, cheese and chocolate. Although our projects are very different, we enjoyed their company and assisted them in "filling in the blanks" when it came to hospital operations and other various information. In the end, they were very pleased with what they saw and drew up a memorandum of understanding so they could send down pharmacists in July to begin training the staff at St. Joseph's. 

I really enjoyed learning about the process of "compounding" and I was surprised to hear that it is practiced in Spain and apparently, in America as well. It makes a lot of sense to apply this technique to rural and isolated hospitals in Africa and I found myself extremely supportive of Fundación el Alto. And of course, I am very pleased to see St. Joseph's get more help, since apparently the state of the pharmacy in the hospital was a disaster. The pharmacists told us that the main pharmacy does a decent job at keeping inventory, but as soon as the drugs go to the different medical wards, they are unaccounted for. No one knows which patients are getting how many drugs and often drugs are mixed into the same container making it difficult to know which ones are expiring. The hospital has computers in nearly every ward and are looking to overhaul their drug tracking system, so Fundación el Alto's timing seems to be perfect for an overhaul of the hospital's pharmacy!