They claim these fail to provide sufficient protection for the patients and consumers’ rights and interests.
The pharmacists have launched an online petition to voice their protest.
A total of 11,013 signatures have been collected so far against the petition against the Rang Undang-Undang Farmasi (RUUF) at ipetitions.com. The RUUF Focus Group hopes to collect 20,000 signatures.
Among the major decisions announced in the draft on May 9 include the removal of the requirement that prescriptions be mandatory, something pharmacists have especially taken issue with.
“We are concerned that if you remove the requirement for mandatory prescriptions, then the onus is on the patient to request these prescriptions,” pharmacist Harpreet Kaur told FMT when contacted.
“They will be put in a situation where they can be denied the prescriptions.”
Director-General of Health Noor Hisham Abdullah had responded to this concern, saying that patients had “every right to make complaints about the doctors” if put in such situations.
However, Harpreet argued that most consumers or patients would not want to go down that route.
“Are they supposed to just go to the pharmacy and inform them verbally that this is the medication that they’re supposed to buy?
“The problem is that the pharmacies cannot give the medication if these patients don’t have a valid prescription,” she said, referring especially to prescription-dependent medicines.
“The patient is stuck — they don’t want to buy from the doctor because it’s expensive, but they can’t get it from the pharmacies because they don’t have the proper paperwork.
“All we are saying is to just make it a mandatory requirement. Whether the patient wants the prescription does not matter.”
Harpreet also pointed out that the new decision opens the system to abuse, allowing doctors to push for patients to purchase repeat medications from the clinic.
“This is a problem for the geriatric community, because some of them have 10-15 medications. Community pharmacies can offer more competitive prices,” she said.
Mandatory prescription, Harpreet argued, was already practised in private and government hospitals and there was no reason to change this situation.
“When you go backwards in policy, it affects the private sector that already complies with international standards for health tourism purposes. These standards make prescriptions a requirement.
“That’s the job of the pharmacies, to check that there is no ill interaction between the medications and the patient’s disease.”
Pharmacists are against the provision that involves the removal of the mandatory requirement that states the diagnosis on prescriptions.
Pharmacists are also unhappy about the other three provisions that allow pharmaceutical compounding to be performed by non-pharmacists, allow psychotropic medicines to be dispensed by prescribers, and allow pharmaceutical technology to be supervised by non-pharmacists.