"Relationships with healthcare professionals authorized to prescribe medicines must not be motivated and conditioned by interests or economic advantages"
Tuesday, 02 December 2014 – Pharmacist33
The relationship between doctor and pharmacist must not exist, except for the fact that the pharmacist asks the doctor for clarifications regarding his prescription so as to fully protect the patient's health. To throw the warning Claudio Dukes, lawyer expert in health and pharmacy law, from the Observatory website Iusfarma.
The clarification is part of the debate that arose following the intervention of the "Privacy Guarantor" relating to the direct passage of prescriptions from the doctor's cabinet to the pharmacy, whether they are taken to the pharmacy by the doctor or his representative or collected from the office doctor by the pharmacist or his representative". A disquisition that «diverts attention from the real problem that has little to do with privacy».
If the direct transfer of the prescription from the doctor's office to the pharmacy, explains the lawyer, «is truly occasional, the problem does not arise or in any case it is of very modest interest; if, on the contrary, it has a habitual character, it involves far more serious aspects than that of the protection of privacy and in particular a relationship between the doctor and the pharmacist which is contrary to art. 14 of pharmacist code of ethics according to which "relationships with health professionals authorized to prescribe medicines must not be motivated and conditioned by interests or economic advantages", a principle which finds its specification in the following art. 15 according to which "the pharmacist must not promote, organize or join initiatives for the hoarding of medical prescriptions anywhere and in any case put in place".
Hence the warning: if the "must be" is to leave the relationship between doctors and pharmacists to requests for clarification on prescriptions alone, "reality, on the other hand, shows frequent interweaving of interest": behind the collection of recipes "there is reason to suspect that unlawful deontological acts and unfair competition are being carried out against other pharmacies that do not use these methods.
Behaviors of this type, however, have their breeding ground in the increasingly widespread practice whereby the pharmacy constitutes its own "treasury" of doctors to whom, contiguously with the premises of the business, premises are almost always rented at for free or even for free.
It is by now a matter of such a widespread habit that it is likely to believe that it can no longer be opposed" and that it is not considered "licit from an ethical point of view". Hence the conclusion: "the hypocrisy of talking about privacy should be avoided when it comes to anything else".
Frances Giani
