Many Hungarian pharmacies can cease operation due to the government

More than 4,100 pharmacists are protesting against the government’s plan to allow pharmacists with a secondary school degree to work in certain drugstores instead of a university degree. The cabinet says this will protect rural drugstores, but opponents say the measure could lead to the disappearance of pharmacists from smaller towns.

The fact is that the anti-pharmacy government wants to create a huge chain, so that the winner of the planned privatisation of hospital pharmacies can then break up the pharmaceutical market, Válasz Online reports in their latest big-picture writing.

Discontent among the pharmacists

In recent years, even big city pharmacies have become specialised pick-up points. Specialised because in that place, a qualified pharmacist worker or pharmacist’s assistant orders the customer back the next day when the special package arrives. The only difference between this kind of pharmacy and a small village drugstore branch is that in the latter, the patient is guaranteed to be served by a pharmacist.

The government is preparing to reform the pharmacy system. Now, a debate has erupted over draft legislation on whether 620 pharmacies in small villages should have a qualified pharmacist. 4147 pharmacists say they should: that’s how many have signed the protest petition.

This amount of signatures out of 6300 pharmacists in the country suggests that it is not only the villagers who are demanding for the legislation to be amended. But what have urban pharmacists and especially patients in big cities got to do with it? A lot, actually: pharmacy without a pharmacist would set a dangerous precedent. That drugstore would be much cheaper to run.

Hungarian government remits the countryside

Hungary’s population decline has hit some of the larger cities and their surroundings, as well as rural areas and remote small towns. Since the turn of the millennium, more than 600,000 fewer people live in the country. Meanwhile, the rules for establishing pharmacies were liberalised in 2006. Within four years, the number of pharmacies serving the population has increased by 22%. The government seems to be letting go of the shrinking countryside. Under the pretext of centralisation, it is closing local public services and relocating residents to nearby cities. Attempts are being made to introduce the ‘telepathic method’ in pharmacies.

According to a draft law, a pharmacist with a secondary school degree should be enough to serve patients in branch pharmacies instead of a pharmacist with a university degree, and a pharmacist should be reachable by phone within 15 minutes.

The real business, however, is not the networking of branches. The big deal is the privatisation of institutional pharmacies and their probable transfer to a single company.

In this way, the 80 or so hospital pharmacies could become a network of networks. According to Bálint Mikola, president of the Hungarian Private Pharmacists Association, this small number of pharmacies will take 30 percent of the market, with the remaining 70 percent shared by more than two thousand institutions.

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