Pharmacist

Pharmacy in Nigeria is a six-year Pharm.D. in most faculties, plus an internship year and NYSC, and the course is dense with chemistry, calculations and memorisation of drugs. Students do fail and repeat years.

How to handle: Get genuinely good at Chemistry and Mathematics in SS1–SS3 rather than just passing them; pharmaceutical calculations and organic chemistry are where students lose years. Once in school, study in a small steady group from first year instead of reading only before exams, and use past questions from your own department. Plan financially for about eight years before you earn a full salary, and look for departmental and state scholarships early.

The pre-registration internship is compulsory, but accredited places at teaching hospitals and good industry placements are limited and competitive, and some graduates wait several months.

How to handle: Start before you graduate: do your student clerkships seriously, because the pharmacists supervising you are the people who recommend interns. Apply widely rather than to only the two or three famous hospitals — state hospitals, accredited community pharmacy chains and pharmaceutical companies also take interns. Keep a clean, simple CV with your clerkship placements on it, and ask your faculty's alumni group where places are opening.

Counterfeit, expired and badly stored drugs circulate in the Nigerian market, and a pharmacist is the person expected to keep them out of a patient's hands — sometimes against commercial pressure.

How to handle: Learn the practical skills while you train: how to verify a supplier, read NAFDAC registration numbers, use the scratch-code verification on packs, keep a cold chain, and document where every batch came from. Buy only from known, registered distributors even when an offer is cheaper, and be willing to lose a sale. If you are an employee being pushed to dispense something you doubt, escalate in writing and know you can report to NAFDAC or the PCN.

Many Nigerians buy drugs, including antibiotics, from patent medicine stores, hawkers or over the internet without a prescription, which undercuts pharmacies and causes real harm such as resistance and wrong dosing.

How to handle: Compete on the one thing those sellers cannot offer: knowledge. Make a habit of actually counselling every patient — dose, timing, what to avoid, when to come back — so people return to you and tell others. Learn basic business skills too (records, stock control, pricing), because a community pharmacy is a shop as well as a practice. If you prefer to avoid retail altogether, hospital, industry, regulatory and public-health pharmacy are all open to you.

Roles overlap in Nigerian hospitals, and disputes between pharmacists, doctors and nurses over prescribing, dispensing and seniority are common and can make daily work tense.

How to handle: Your protection is competence and courtesy. When you query a prescription, come with the specific reason — the dose, the interaction, the patient's kidney function — and raise it privately with the prescriber first rather than in front of patients. Keep notes of what you queried and what was agreed. Join the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria once you qualify so you are not handling professional disputes alone.