Continuing Professional Development and the City of Kampala

By Prosperity Eneh

Intern CPD
Thursday morning (6/7/16) started out early as we headed to the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) pharmacy intern meeting at the Makerere College of Health Sciences. Only problem is that we ended up in the wrong room to start off..

Waiting in the wrong room (oops!)

Thankfully we had the Intern President to help direct us to the right room for this meeting! Pharmacy interns in Uganda are scattered all over various hospitals and medical centers in the country. The internship year is a mandatory part of being a pharmacist in Uganda and students are eligible to complete this one year program after they have finished their 4 year pharmacy degree (Bachelors in pharmacy program). The CPD meeting is set up to educate the interns on a range of clinical information and the topic of discussion today was Pulmonary Tuberculosis (TB). The presentation was delivered by Patrick Opio who is a pharmacist that works for Mulago National Referral Hospital (currently in Kirrudu General Hospital). This was a great topic for us to learn about given the prevalence of Pulmonary TB in Uganda and in the patient population we will continue to work with while here. After his presentation, he encouraged the interns to continue to stay involved in research and clinical work. He made two statements that I would love to highlight - "the patient's care team is not complete without the pharmacist" and "get involved with research when you are able to". From these statements, it is great to see that in Uganda as well, the pharmacy profession is working to be further integrated into the patient's care team and be able to contribute the unique knowledge that we possess based on our training, for improved patient outcomes.

CPD attendees for today

City of Kampala

Caramel Cafe and Lounge

Getty image of the City of Kampala

As Dr. Nicol departs today, we decided to have a goodbye lunch at a new restaurant that opened at the Acacia Mall. We all enjoyed the meal and some of us had some pastries as well. The ambience of the place and the contrast to some other parts of the city made me think of talking about our environment in this post. Kampala is like many world cities with a wide range of socioeconomic classes represented. We have visited many upscale restaurants like the one where we had lunch today called Caramel Cafe & Lounge (pictured) and there are also many other places like the big shopping malls/centers, extensive office building and very nice apartments/hotels in downtown Kampala. It is also however not very uncommon to find things that are unique to poorer cities like street hawking and unfinished or bad roads in the city of Kampala.  Pictured below is our Uber driver from today (yes we use Uber a lot!) purchasing a clothing item from one of the street hawkers that walk alongside traffic jams. That being said, Kampala is such a vibrant city and there continues to be growth and development.

Today's Uber Driver making a purchase