Ralph Ban­warie

Free­lance Cor­re­spon­dent

The Phar­ma­cy Board of Trinidad and To­ba­go has elect­ed San­jay Mo­hammed as its new pres­i­dent, mark­ing the next chap­ter in a jour­ney that be­gan far from board­rooms and pro­fes­sion­al coun­cils.

As a young phar­ma­cy stu­dent, Mo­hammed bal­anced his stud­ies with work, in­clud­ing sell­ing news­pa­pers and trad­ing in the bustling Tu­na­puna Mar­ket.

Those ear­ly ex­pe­ri­ences, he says, helped shape his work eth­ic and gave him a deep ap­pre­ci­a­tion for the every­day lives of peo­ple liv­ing in the com­mu­ni­ties phar­ma­cists ul­ti­mate­ly serve.

Years lat­er, that same stu­dent be­come a phar­ma­cy own­er, a leader in pro­fes­sion­al gov­er­nance and is now the head of the coun­try’s phar­ma­cy reg­u­la­to­ry au­thor­i­ty.

The Phar­ma­cy Board re­cent­ly elect­ed its new ex­ec­u­tive to guide the work of the coun­cil for the up­com­ing term, with Mo­hammed cho­sen to head it.

Mo­hammed pre­vi­ous­ly served as sec­re­tary-trea­sur­er of the board, where he was in­volved in strength­en­ing gov­er­nance struc­tures and sup­port­ing ini­tia­tives aimed at im­prov­ing the ad­min­is­tra­tion of the phar­ma­cy pro­fes­sion in T&T.

Re­flect­ing on his elec­tion, Mo­hammed ex­pressed grat­i­tude to the mem­ber­ship for the con­fi­dence placed in him and ac­knowl­edged the con­tri­bu­tions of the im­me­di­ate past pres­i­dent and out­go­ing coun­cil, thank­ing them for their ser­vice to the pro­fes­sion dur­ing the pre­vi­ous term.

“The work of the Phar­ma­cy Board is fun­da­men­tal­ly about pro­tect­ing the pub­lic in­ter­est and up­hold­ing the stan­dards of the pro­fes­sion,” Mo­hammed said.

“Phar­ma­cists play a vi­tal role in the health­care sys­tem, and the board has a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to en­sure that the pro­fes­sion con­tin­ues to evolve in a way that re­flects pro­fes­sion­al­ism, in­tegri­ty and ac­count­abil­i­ty.”

Mo­hammed promised that the new coun­cil will con­tin­ue ef­forts to strength­en gov­er­nance and mod­ernise the board’s sys­tems and process­es, while main­tain­ing strong en­gage­ment with the pro­fes­sion.

He al­so em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of en­cour­ag­ing broad­er par­tic­i­pa­tion in pro­fes­sion­al lead­er­ship, par­tic­u­lar­ly among younger phar­ma­cists en­ter­ing the field.

“Our pro­fes­sion is for­tu­nate to have many tal­ent­ed phar­ma­cists with new ideas and per­spec­tives,” he said.

“En­cour­ag­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion and lead­er­ship de­vel­op­ment with­in the pro­fes­sion is es­sen­tial to en­sur­ing that the board re­mains strong and re­spon­sive in the years ahead,” he added.

For Mo­hammed, the path from the stalls of Tu­na­puna to the lead­er­ship of the coun­try’s phar­ma­cy reg­u­la­to­ry body re­flects not just per­son­al de­ter­mi­na­tion, but the op­por­tu­ni­ties that ed­u­ca­tion and pro­fes­sion­al ser­vice can cre­ate.

As the new coun­cil be­gins its term, he says his fo­cus will re­main on strength­en­ing the board’s role in pro­tect­ing the pub­lic while sup­port­ing the con­tin­ued ad­vance­ment of the phar­ma­cy pro­fes­sion in T&T.