Exceptional dispensation: need of the patient

The prescription-dispensation process in Spain is plagued by gaps and inefficiencies that the COVID-19 pandemic has only highlighted further if possible. What is striking about all this are the few competencies that the law assigns to the community pharmacist to help the patient follow their treatment in the face of the slightest formal ruling in the prescription. These competences are reduced to the replacement of generic bioequivalent to another with exactly the same presentation, dose, galenic form, etc., and as an exceptional thing the possibility of blocking the dispensation in case of obvious health risk. This situation is clearly insufficient in everyday life where we find incomplete prescriptions, frequent shortages, inadequate galenic forms, loss, breakage...and all kinds of situations in which the only official solution for the patient toaccess their treatment is: “go to the health center." A breakthrough would undoubtedly be what is already known as “exceptional dispensation”; that is, the possibility of safeguarding the spiritof prescription by the pharmacist, in a situation of urgency or need, in which he dispenses the most appropriate medicine within the real possibilities availableto him/her in order to guarantee the patient his/her availability and adequate use of his/her medication according to the patient and his/her needs. This reality has been regulated for years in many developed countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand...and supported for years by the International Pharmaceutical Federation (IFP).