On March 3, 2021, Dr. Andrew Radley, a consultant in public health pharmacy at Tayside NHS Board, Directorate of public health, and an honorary senior lecturer at the School of Medicine, University of Dundee delivered a virtual career counseling session to the college of pharmacy students at Gulf Medical University. The topic of the talk was “Community Pharmacist Profiling: Using Community Pharmacy Reach to Address Health Inequalities”.
Dr. Andrew Radley participated in designing and evaluating national population health services in community pharmacies in Scotland and the United Kingdom. During his talk, he addressed the need for making community pharmacies pharmacotherapy centers that address population health issues. He discussed the process of establishing data-driven services that serve the needs of the community. He gave the example of community pharmacy-based services such as screening and treating hepatitis C and diabetes, smoking cessation programs for expecting mothers, and provision of contraceptives to curb unwanted pregnancies in the community. He emphasized the need to engage the population, and other stakeholders at the planning and implementation stage and the need to select strategies that suit the community served to ensure sustainability and better outcomes.