015 Freddy Kitutu
On today's episode, we are fortunate enough to welcome Dr Freddy Kitutu all the way from Kampala, Uganda. Kampala is situated right next to the largest lake in Africa, the beautiful and illustrious Lake Victoria. My mother is originally from Uganda and has shared her memories of visiting this lake my father after they got married which makes this episode relatively personal for me. Dr Freddy is currently the Dean of the School of Health Sciences at Makerere University. He is the youngest dean of the university and possibly the youngest dean within the region. He considers himself an academic pharmacist at heart with a special focus on health systems research. He is passionate about teaching clinical pharmacy to undergraduate pharmacy students, specifically concentrating on infectious diseases.
In today's episode, we explore some of Freddy's journey but we focus a lot of our conversation on the pharmacy profession in Uganda. We discuss the following:
- the perception of pharmacists to the general public/society
- the history of pharmacy as a profession within the country and how it is evolving with time
- the governing body for pharmacy and it's role
- accessibility to pharmacy services and the affordability of healthcare services
- the types of healthcare services available to the general public
- availability of medicines and healthcare supplies
- the roles of pharmacists and career opportunities within Uganda
We also talk about Dr Freddy's collaboration and partnership with the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer's Global Health Fellowship Programme and his experience of visiting the UK to see how clinical pharmacy services work in our country and how they can potentially be set up in Uganda. If you'd like to know more about the fellowship, please go back to Episode 009 with Claire Braindish.
You can follow Dr Freddy on social media:
Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter. Feel free to subscribe to the podcast on your favourite podcast platform so you can be notified when a new episode is released or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you have any suggestions for guests you want me to talk to or if you’d like to come on yourself, please feel free to contact me via social media, or email at info@pharmacistdiaries.com.
