Pharmacy education not company-oriented

COIMBATORE: The research on pharmaceutical science and the practice of medicine were inter-related, which needed to be studied at wider level, Dr Meer Mustafa Hussain, Vice-Chancellor, the Tamil Nadu Dr M G R Medical University, said on Wednesday.

Speaking as the chief guest at the college day celebration of College of Pharmacy here, Hussain said the healthcare practitioner were continuously in search of literature to provide supporting evidence for decisions and justification of patient-care actions.

Saying that the pharmaceutical companies were able to draw enough foreign exchange while exporting their produce, he said that the prices of pharmaceutical companies were daily shootin to high rate of returns in stock exchanges.

The pharmacy education thus was not company oriented, it also opens area for the student to continue their post-graduate course and then to pursue research, Hussain said.

It was projected that by 2020, demand for pharma specialists at various levels would be over 1.7 million in India.

Since India has got a core competence of producing cost effective and quality pharma products, the specialists must keep the target in mind and contribute adequately for the realisation of Indian Pharma vision 2020, for which acquisition of knowledge was indeed an important need, Hussain said.

The Indian pharma industry at present has a turnover of 12.5 billion dollars of generics for domestic and export markets against the production of 78 billion dollars of generics in the World, Hussain said.