Japanese Drugstore To Move Into Prescription Market

Japan's largest drugstore, Matsumoto Kiyoshi, with 300 retail outlets,is to switch its main emphasis from general health consumer products to "the business of filling prescriptions" starting next year, according to its vice president, Namio Matsumoto.

The company believes that the government's policy to reduce medical spending will lead doctors to cut back on practice-based drug dispensing. At the same time, the Ministry of Health and Welfare is promoting a system in which patients will rely increasingly on local drugstores for their prescriptions.

Hospitals are currently handling about 8,000 billion yen ($63.04 billion) of drug prescriptions a year, but industry forecasts indicate that a considerable portion of this will be handled in future by drugstores. The Japanese drugstore sector quotes the example of the USA, where doctors issue prescriptions but are not allowed to dispense drugs directly and where drugstores dispense most of the scripts.