Wholesaling law change leaves pharmacists confused

This morning, BBC 1 News was talking about how a pharmaceutical company in the northeast of England was helping to improve the UK recovery through its exporting activities (>90% of its products are exported overseas).

I personal think that it is a shame that at a time when there are strong demands from overseas for UK pharmaceutical products, we discouraging pharmacists from contributing to the UK recovery, through export activities. My question is, is it not possible for UK pharmaceutical companies to increase their production quotas, so as to accomodate for the export demands or is this another scheme by the bigger organisations to monopolise the pharmaceutical export business? My only fear is that these other exporters may not necessarily know where the small, but significant demands are originating from. Again, even if they know, they will not be in a position to meet them, due to the nature of the demands - small, but varied. That's a big loss for the UK economy.

As Clinical Director of Rxchange.co.uk, I and colleagues met with the MHRA in May to clarify some of the issues changes to this legislation raised.

The MHRA confirmed that after the repeal of 10.7, in accordance with the MHRA policy statement, supply of medicinal products would still be possible without a WDL in some circumstances. They described a sliding scale with the selling or supply of medicines to meet patient need at one end and the commercial trading of medicines at the other. Supply to meet an identifiable patient need was fully acceptable and does not require a WDL.

Rxchange released a statement jointly with Sigma Pharmaceuticals PLC which can be found at http://rxchange.co.uk/news/operation-of-rxchange-after-repeal.php giving full details of the result of our discussion.

Thank you Michelle. The second section cleared everything up. Good to see we can start to use Rxchange.

This action may be linked to the new EU GDP Guidelines for Medicines coming into effect in 2013.