Mail-Order Pharmacy "Impossible" In UK

UK National Health Service prescriptions could not be supplied from national mail-order pharmacies unless the provisions of existing NHS legislation were amended to make specific provision for this, Sue Sharpe, director of legal services at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, has told a Society of Pharmaceutical Medicine symposium in London.

Such a move would undermine the structures for local determination, administration and provision of NHS services, she said. The 1977 NHS Act imposes a duty on the Secretary of State to establish local health agencies required to administer arrangements for local provision of pharmaceutical services. Under Section 41 of the Act, the agencies must "arrange as respects their locality for the provision to persons who are in that locality....pharmaceutical services - ie medicines prescribed by a doctor or dentist," while Section 42 requires regulations to enable persons in the agency's locality for whom medicines are ordered to receive them, and to prepare and publish "lists of persons who undertake to provide pharmaceutical services from premises" in the locality.

Moreover, she said, the NHS (Pharmaceutical Services) Regulations 1992 provide procedures for inclusion in a pharmaceutical list, for change of premises within the locality. These speak of a "neighborhood;" if a premises change within the neighborhood is considered as a minor relocation then it is to be approved. They do not define the word "neighborhood," but case law looks to the population to be served and catchment areas as well as to the proximity of the two sets of premises.