The Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria (ACPN) has presented a five-tier career progression framework for community pharmacists at the 84th FIP World Congress of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in Montreal, Canada.
The framework, developed through the Community Pharmacists Assessment and Career Progression Institute (CPACPI), seeks to address the lack of a structured career pathway for pharmacists practising in community settings and strengthen their role in primary healthcare delivery.
The presentation was made by ACPN National Chairman, Pharm. Ambrose Igwekamma Ezeh, during the four-day congress held from August 30 to September 2, 2026, under the theme, “One Health, One Pharmacy – Bridging science, practice, and education.”
The congress brought together pharmacists, pharmaceutical scientists, healthcare professionals, educators and industry stakeholders from different countries to discuss developments in pharmacy practice, healthcare delivery, research, education and workforce development.
Ezeh said the CPACPI initiative was designed to develop a sustainable community pharmacy workforce capable of contributing more effectively to primary healthcare.
“Our mission through CPACPI is not merely to create an academic milestone, but to build a resilient, sustainable workforce capable of delivering world-class primary healthcare,” he said.
The framework provides five professional bands: Community Pharmacist, Senior Community Pharmacist, Community Pharmacy Specialist, Community Pharmacy Senior Specialist and Community Pharmacy Consultant.
Progression through the bands would be based on competencies including specialised clinical care, mentorship, digital health integration and continuous quality improvement.
The initiative was introduced by ACPN in 2025 as a structured platform for assessing and advancing the careers of community pharmacists.
The research presented alongside the framework, titled “The Implementation Gap: Perceived Barriers and External Threats to Community Pharmacists’ Participation in a Career Advancement Scheme in Nigeria,” involved 182 practising community pharmacists across the country.
The study identified workload pressures, limited practice time and the high cost of training and certification as major barriers to participation in professional development programmes.
It also identified weak regulatory enforcement as the most significant systemic threat to community pharmacy practice, while illegal medicine outlets and increasing competition from patent medicine vendors were cited as other major concerns.
More than three-fifths of respondents said the demands of daily practice limited their ability to participate consistently in career advancement programmes.
The study also found that younger and mid-career pharmacists with fewer than 20 years of professional experience were more concerned about the financial burden of professional development than their more senior counterparts.
To address the challenges, ACPN said it would introduce tiered, subsidised professional development grants, particularly to reduce the financial burden on younger pharmacists.
The association also plans to deploy flexible, self-paced digital learning modules to allow pharmacists to acquire additional competencies without significantly disrupting patient care.
Ezeh further called for stronger multi-agency enforcement against illegal medicine outlets and unaccredited vendors, saying this would help protect professional practice and improve patient safety.
Beyond career advancement, ACPN is seeking formal recognition of accredited community pharmacies as private-sector primary healthcare facilities.
“There is a pressing need for government authorities, policy-makers, and national health authorities to identify and designate qualified community pharmacies as official primary healthcare facility providers in the private sector,” Ezeh said.
He said community pharmacies were among the most accessible points of healthcare for Nigerians and should be integrated into the national primary healthcare architecture and health insurance system.
According to him, such integration would expand access to healthcare, improve patient outcomes and reduce pressure on overstretched public health facilities.
He said the long-term success of CPACPI would depend on collaboration among regulatory agencies, professional bodies, policymakers and other stakeholders.
“The long-term success of the CPACPI framework rests on our collective ability to bridge the gap between policy design and real-world execution,” he said.
He identified regulatory support, affordable professional development, reduced workload barriers and stronger enforcement of market standards as critical to the sustainability of the initiative.
The ACPN said the presentation of the framework at the global congress marked a step towards repositioning community pharmacy in Nigeria from a predominantly medicine-dispensing practice to a more structured, competency-driven and clinically oriented component of primary healthcare.