Assessment of Pharmacists Prescribing Practices in Poland-A Descriptive Study.

Agnieszka Zimmermann,Natalia Wrzosek,Artur Owczarek,Jakub Płaczek

doi:10.3390/healthcare9111505

Abstract

Pharmacists play a beneficial role in supplying medicines to patients. Pharmacist prescribing practices were introduced into law in Poland in 2002, permitting pharmacists to prescribe medications in emergency situations and in 2020 the new law allowed to prescribe in all situation where it is needed because of the health risks reasons. Our aim was to analyze pharmacist prescribing practices in Poland and confirm the useful of pharmacists’ activity in this area. Additionally, pharmacists were also authorized to issue reimbursed prescriptions for themselves or their family members. Since January 2020, only e-prescriptions are allowed in Poland. A retrospective analysis of the inspection written reports from 842 community pharmacies in the representative region of Poland with a population of two million, carried out in the time period from 2002 to 2016 was performed (2189 prescriptions) to assess the emergency pharmacist prescribing practices in Poland. The second part of the research was based on digital data on pharmacists prescriptions (18,529) provided by the e-Health Centre (a governmental organization under the Ministry of Health responsible for the development of health care information systems in Poland), enabling to conduct the analysis of pharmacist’s prescribing from 1 of April 2020 to 31 of October 2020. The analysis gave the insight of the evolution of the pharmacy prescribing patterns. In general, pharmaceutical prescriptions were issued in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, in town- or city center pharmacies, and in pharmacies in residential areas. The most common reason for a pharmaceutical prescription was that the patient was running out of a medicine and was unable to contact their physician. Cardiovascular, respiratory, dermatological, and digestive medications were most frequently prescribed. An analysis of pharmacists’ prescribing data from 1 April 2020 to 31 October 2020 confirmed the rapid increase of pharmaceutical prescriptions following implementation of the new legislative act during the COVID-19 epidemic.

Highlights

In its classic sense, a prescription is a specific message conveyed by a person authorized to issue such a document to a person who fills it in a pharmacy
The first phase of the study analyzed the records of pharmaceutical prescriptions from 842 pharmacies
One American study indicated that 75% of pharmacists only fill emergency prescriptions several times a month and that they may dispense antibiotics, inhaled medications, antidiabetic medicines, and drugs used for nausea and vomiting [22]

Summary

Introduction

A prescription is a specific message conveyed by a person authorized to issue such a document to a person who fills it in a pharmacy. In the UK, as in Poland, a pharmacist has discretionary power to dispense prescription-only medicine when a patient is unable to present the appropriate prescription and after interviewing the patient. This commonly occurs when a travelling patient forgot to pack their medication. Psychotropic medications and narcotics, except for phenobarbital (limited to a five-day course of treatment) for epilepsy sufferers, are excluded from these provisions All such dispensing requires formal documentation [4] including a description of the exceptional circumstances. The pharmacist’s discretion only extends to dispensing medicine and to the continuation of existing therapy, but does not authorize the pharmacist to initiate new therapy

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