Will a pharmacist issue a prescription for a free vaccine?

Intensive legislative work on amendments to the provisions of the Act on publicly funded healthcare services has been underway for several months. One of the drafts concerns the extension of the prescribing powers.

Initially, the draft concerned only the extension of prescribing entitlements in respect of reimbursed medicines, foodstuffs for special nutritional purposes and medical devices available free of charge to patients under the age of 18 or over the age of 65. In accordance with the proposed regulations, the entitled to issue such prescriptions will be any person who has the right to prescribe resulting directly from the exercise of his or her medical profession, if this right is enshrined in the regulations governing the exercise of this profession. A reference to the definition of ‘entitled person’ within the meaning of Article 2(14) of the Reimbursement Act was used for this purpose.

However, comments made to the draft as part of the public consultations carried out resulted in the addition of amendments to Article 96(4) of the Pharmaceutical Law. The current draft amendment assumes, among other things, that a pharmacist holding a licence to practice will be able to issue a pharmaceutical prescription for an immunological product necessary to carry out in a pharmacy a recommended immunisation within the meaning of Article 19(1) of the Act on preventing and combating infections and infectious diseases in humans. The authority to issue a pharmaceutical prescription therefore no longer applies only to the flu vaccine. As before, such a prescription will be the basis for the use of the vaccine in the pharmacy open to the public where the pharmacist issued the prescription.  

An important change is also the introduction of an exception to the principle of 100% payment for the filling of a pharmaceutical prescription for an immunological product necessary for a recommended immunisation in a pharmacy. Patients entitled to free provision of medicinal products on the basis of specific provisions will therefore benefit from this option free of charge. 
The above changes are a response to appeals from the pharmacy industry. They are primarily aimed at increasing accessibility by shortening the pathway for eligible patient groups, thereby increasing the effectiveness of preventive vaccination in Poland.