The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on pharmacy practices in the tropics: Nigeria as a case study

ABSTRACT

As the pandemic was sudden and no time was given to prepare for the lockdown measure, pharmaceutical practices were significantly disrupted in the aspects of manufacturing and supplying drugs, sales, and profit-making. Therefore, this study assessed the impacts of COVID-19 crisis on pharmaceutical practices in Nigeria. A descriptive cross-sectional design survey was adopted to draw information from the pharmacists (respondents) among the targeted population. 1,200 professional and practice pharmacists were systematically and randomly selected across the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria, while 1,118 copies of the administered questionnaire were retrieved, coded, and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics aided by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 23 to run the analyses. The findings showed that COVID-19 had negative impacts on pharmaceutical practices, especially in hospital and community practices. A 25%-49% decrease was highly indicated in sales, purchase orders, and profits, while the majority, 347 (31.04%) of the respondents, indicated that they had a 1%-24% decrease in their workforce. Also, total lockdown as a COVID-19 measure increased the level of insecurity and inflation during the pandemic. 75.13% of the pharmacists who represent the targeted population indicated that their place of work largely enforced COVID-19 basic preventive measures during the pandemic. This study concludes that necessary efforts should be put in place to ease the affairs of the pharmaceutical practices before, during, and after the pandemic.