Emmanuel Ayanjoke graduated from pharmacy school in the months leading up to the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic. While challenging, he said, it was a rewarding and educational experience as he considered how to open his own pharmacy.
“I’ll never forget when I had one patient walk in. She had just lost three of her siblings to COVID-19, and just the fact that she could get [the vaccination] right there and be protected and be safe, she was so thankful,” he says.
Now the owner of Altev Community Pharmacy in Avondale, Ohio, Emmanuel is carrying on his family’s pharmacy tradition, but in a different country. He grew up in Sagamu, Nigeria, where his late father’s role as a community pharmacist inspired him to enter the field himself. Pharmacy there was very different, he said.
“Pharmacists prescribed all day, but it wasn’t seen as prescribing per se, because most drugs people had access to without prescriptions—even though it’s not supposed to be that way,” he says.
You can read more about Emmanuel’s journey in this month’s issue of America’s Pharmacist®. Read here.
