Disruptive Technology in Pharmaceutical Education and Practice: Curriculum Reforms Imperative for Africa

Disruptive technology can be defined as one that displaces an established technology and shakes up the industry or a ground-breaking product that creates a completely new industry. Globally there are developments in various areas of advanced technology which are popularly known as disruptive technology. This has affected many areas of pharmaceutical education and practice such that if the curriculum is not modified to take care of these areas, many pharmacy graduates will be outdated. The areas that affect pharmaceutical education and practice most are artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Big Data and a host of others. Thus, there is the need to retool the curriculum in Nigeria to bring our students up to date with developments elsewhere. The students need to be taught the basic aspects while in school to be able to apply them in the area of practice. For this to be possible the teachers need to be able to have the basic knowledge to be able to impact this on the students. Another area that is very important is the issue of pharmacy laws and jurisprudence. This is critical because of the many issues of fake drugs in the market. These are the focus of this paper.