Pharmacy for the pharmacist, or pharmacies will become fewer and fewer

Yesterday, President Andrzej Duda signed an amendment to the Pharmaceutical Law, already known as 'Pharmacy for the pharmacist'. In light of the newly-enacted changes, the licence to operate a pharmacy for the general public will be available to pharmacists with a licence to practise their profession who run a sole proprietorship, as well as to general or partnership companies whose object of activity is exclusively the operation of pharmacies and in which the partners (partners) are exclusively pharmacists with a licence to practise their profession. This excludes taking over pharmacies from parents if the heir is not a Master of Pharmacy. A pharmacist will only be allowed to own four pharmacies.

Under the new rules, pharmacies will have to meet goegraphic and demographic criteria. In the case of the establishment of new pharmacies, this will be 3,000 inhabitants per municipality per pharmacy and the distance between neighbouring facilities will be at least 500 metres. This criterion will not apply if a pharmacist opens a new pharmacy one kilometre away from an existing one. According to the employers' organisation, the changes to the law are a haphazard patching up of loopholes, rather than a coherent idea for defining the role of pharmacies, and the medical professionals working there, in the health care system in Poland.

They have nothing to do with increasing the level of health security of Poles, but seem to be aimed solely at gradually eliminating competition for the pharmacy corporation. The Act makes it virtually impossible to open new pharmacies.

Employer representatives emphasise that the amendment of the Pharmaceutical Law Act may be incompatible with the Polish Constitution. In May this year, Professor Bogusław Banaszak, a constitutionalist and, since January 2017, a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal, issued an opinion on the new legislation.

The material appeared in the newspaper Głos Wielkopolski:

17 May 2017:
" Pharmacy for the pharmacist, or pharmacies will become fewer and fewer