By Atalay Mulu Fentie, Lecturer at School of Pharmacy, College of Health Sciences, Addis Ababa University

I, Atalay Mulu Fentie, have been working as a clinical pharmacist and oncology pharmacy service case team coordinator since September, 2013 at Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital and lecturer at School of Pharmacy, Addis Ababa University since June, 2017. My role is doing cancer related research projects, teaching pharmacy students, supervising nurses doing chemo-admixture and providing accurate and up-to-date evidence based information to other health care team members during major clinical rounds; which all would impact the clinical decision process and even patient treatment outcomes.

Thanks to the International Society of Oncology Pharmacy Practitioners (ISOPP), I received a travel grant to attend the XVIII ISOPP symposium which was held from October 10- 14, at Novotel, London, UK.  As a symposium participant, I had a poster presentation entitled “Treatment Outcomes and Adherence to Imatinib among Newly Diagnosed Patients with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia in Ethiopia: A Prospective Cohort Study”.  Apart from this, I also attended >16 different sessions presented by area experts.  All presentations had really new and important information for me; and it was good to build up the knowledge I have. Particularly, I was not familiar with topics like dose banding, impact of personalized medicine in the evolution of pharmacotherapy, cancer trial end points and immunotherapy and other targeted therapy related topics.  These all will help me to improve services provided in oncology/hematology units, not only at Tikur Anbessa Specialized hospital but also to our country at large and support the same by problem solving and conducting research in collaboration with others. In addition to creating research collaboration here in Ethiopia and experts in other countries, I will disseminate the new knowledge to others as part of clinical rounds and also prepare trainings in collaboration with other concerned bodies.  

When I started oncology pharmacy service in the year 2013 along with my colleagues, it was promising and had a huge impact on the area in our country. But, since then due to different reasons, the rest of my colleagues left the unit and made me frustrated.  However, thanks to ISOPP and other international organizations, now our country’s oncology pharmacy service is reviving along with an increased number of cancer treatment centers from one center to 10-centers. Even, now pharmacists mix chemo drugs in four of the centers.  

In light of the challenges I have, currently I am fully engaged in two oncology related projects namely: 1) Oncology Pharmacy Workforce, Practice, and Policy Development in Ethiopia in collaboration with Purdue University College of Pharmacy, 2) Pediatric Cancer Database Development in Ethiopia for Epidemiology, Implementation Science, and Advocacy in collaboration with University of North Carolina.

To develop and fully implement the above two projects, I have found the XVIII ISOPP symposium that took place in London, UK to be very crucial and am sure the ISOPP scientific committee will support me at any time.       

Thanks again for creating such opportunities and sponsoring my travel costs.

Fun Run at ISOPP 2019	Atalay Mulu Fentie at ISOPP 2019 Poster Exhibition
ISOPP 2019 Attendees	ISOPP 2019 Attendees
ISOPP 2019 Attendees	ISOPP 2019 Attendees
ISOPP 2019 Attendees