KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 1 – The Ministry of Health (MOH) plans to push legal amendments to enforce mandatory prescriptions by doctors upon their patients’ request.
“This policy will empower patients and empower them to make choices about the supply of medicines either directly from their treating physician or through a pharmacist based on a prescription,” Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad said in a parliament reply yesterday.
This follows pharmacists demanding last August for doctors to issue prescriptions so that patients can get medicines from pharmacies, as well as for the ability to charge professional consultation fees.
Malaysian Pharmaceutical Society president Amrahi Buang also called for legislation to enforce pharmacists’ consultation fees.
He requested for a review of the current government policy that mandates prescriptions only upon patients’ request — as opposed to dispensing separation — citing 2018 statistics by the Medication Error Reporting System (MERS) under the Health Ministry that found about 72 per cent of medication errors occurred during the prescribing process, of which about 93 per cent was reported by pharmacists.
