My Name is Nadia Younis, born in 1966, and graduated from Pharmacy Faculty / University of Jordan in June 1988. Since then I became involved in lot of issues related to Pharmacy in UAE. First I worked as a Trainee Pharmacists in a small busy Pharmacy in Abu Dhabi (Al- Manarah), then preferred to work for a multinational Pharmaceutical company and by doing this I took a big challenge , as I was from the very first ladies worked as medical representatives in UAE. First I worked for an American company MEAD- JOHNSON Nutrition line, marketing their baby formulas (Enfamil) for doctors in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain . After Mead- Johnson in 1991 I moved to a Swiss company named Ciba –Giegy at that time, which after many mergers with other companies changed its name to Novartis Healthcare. In this company I worked as medical representative specifically for their Consumer Healthcare line, where they took up all the OTC products their merged companies used to have. Novartis was the first to create this kind of consumer line specialization in the region. By traveling in Abu Dhabi Emirate’s regions, visiting and making good relations with doctors and Pharmacists, mingling with patients in the waiting areas, I became more and more in touch with the culture of the patients and the medical field and was able to witness the differences and at the same time the commons between national community culture and attitudes toward healthcare matters and that of the residents. I can tell that real transformations happened since then in the UAE-healthcare field. After working for international companies in business oriented culture, I decided to leave and look for a calmer natured job, so I applied for Ministry of Health, and insisted to work in the regulatory affairs to found out that what I expected was totally wrong. Working in a regulatory body was not calm at all; on the contrary it is as challenging as no other field. In my new job (now 5 years) I experienced the very hard formula where you have to balance between many sides of a difficult and long equation. By working in so diverse two sides of the pharmaceutical field, I found out that our Pharmacy Practice in our region is far from the ambitions that I was looking for while studying. Unfortunately in the last 18 years I just witnessed a lot of deterioration rather than improvement, I can see Pharmacists now a days where their potentials are not fulfilled, are just a wasted energy. Not because their un- willingness or incompetence but because of the set- ups they are working in and regulatory systems which are not helping them in the right way. So Far I feel a lot must be done in this aspect, we as UAE Pharmacists should work harder to create a kind of momentum to improve things. I am looking forward to make this web site more like a forum for Pharmacists as healthcare professionals and all interested to discuss and find out solutions and suggestion in order to move forward with a real action. This is my intention from having this web site (apart from being requested by my Zayed University, where I am studying to pursue a Masters Degree in Healthcare Executive Management). My regards to any of you who took the patience to read this introduction and hope you will visit the forum and share with all of us your views.
|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
