The year 2024 through the eyes of pharmacists

Marek Tomkow:

I look at 2024 from the point of view of the current term of the Supreme Pharmaceutical Council, i.e. the last 10 months. And it was indeed a time that was fraught with very big changes. One of them was the change of regulations that say that pharmacists are not responsible for prescriptions issued by the electronic system if they are issued in error. This resulted in a change to the relevant regulation on contracts with the National Health Fund.

The biggest change seems to have been the completion of the prescribing and fulfillment team and the prescription. The conclusions that came out of this report (and we hope that they will be turned into some very sensible bill soon) will strongly remodel the functioning of e-prescribing in Poland in general. There, there were two interesting proposals concerning both continuing prescriptions issued by pharmacists and the possibility of so-called "free prescribing," i.e., a situation in which a given pharmacy no longer has to have a prescriber (as before), but can convert these premises into facilities for pharmaceutical care.

The parliament has passed an amendment to the Law on Health Care Services, according to which pharmacists will have the right to issue prescriptions for 26 recommended vaccinations. If such vaccines were reimbursed, they would also have the right to reimbursement.

The icing on the cake are new entitlements that allow pharmacists to issue pro auctore and pro familia prescriptions for so-called S-ers, i.e. seniors, and pregnant women and children under 18.

There were indeed a lot of changes. Some of them concerned the defense of topics that were important to us, which we fought for several years. On the other hand, all the time, the development of pharmaceutical care is taking place systematically.