Pharmaceutical care assessment in community pharmacies in Nigeria

There has been remarkable growth in pharmacy practice over the past two decades. Pharmacists now assume greater responsibilities to their patients drug therapy needs. The philosophy of pharmaceutical care has been accepted worldwide as the primary mission of pharmacy. In this era of pharmaceutical care, most pharmacists globally claim to have good understanding of the concepts of pharmaceutical care but in its description, there has been lots of consistencies. In the entire West Africa sub region, it has been shown that not much of pharmaceutical care appears to be known. For community pharmacists to universally deliver pharmaceutical care,there should be a tool for measuring pharmacists activities which will provide meaning to the term. Lack of standards for measuring pharmacists activities in performing pharmaceutical care has been identified as a primary obstruction to the widespread implementation of pharmaceutical care. Pharmaceutical care posses great challenges before the pharmacy profession in Nigeria and these challenges need to be addressed in order to move pharmaceutical care from a theoretical statement to an operational level.