Changes in pharmaceutical prescription authorizations and their impact on the number of prescriptions issued by pharmacists in Poland

The Pharmaceutical Law Act of September 6, 2001 (PLA) initially granted pharmacists the authority to issue pharmaceutical prescriptions upon its enactment. However, the legislation regulating this matter changed significantly in 2015. Article 96, section 4 of the PLA defined that, in the front of a direct health threat to a patient, a pharmacist could dispense a medication classified under the availability categories Rp or Rpz. In April 2020, the imprecise term “sudden” in relation to health threats was clarified and removed. Concurrently, all active pharmacists were granted the authority to issue prescriptions, commonly known as pro auctore and pro familiae. The aim of the study was to illustrate the influence of legislative processes on the number of prescriptions issued by practicing pharmacists. To conduct the study, we employed a legal and comparative analysis of relevant legal provisions, followed by a statistical analysis of data obtained from the E-Health Center about the number of prescriptions issued. The results indicated that since the extension of pharmacists’ rights (after April 2020), the average number of pharmaceutical prescriptions issued per month was 151,082. Between May 2020, when pharmacists were granted the authority to issue pro auctore and pro familiae prescriptions, and October 2023, 1,460,385 such prescriptions were dispensed. As a result, a significant relationship between the form of the legislative norms empowering pharmacists to independently prescribe Rx status medicines and the effectiveness of these amendments as measured by the number of prescriptions issued was demonstrated.