Most medicines can still be dispensed even if they return an alert from the Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) database, the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) has advised.
The FMD is a series of European anti-counterfeiting measures that will see pharmacists scan packs of medication to very their authenticity before they are dispensed. It comes into effect tomorrow (9 February).
In the early days of the directive, medicines should only not be dispensed if there is ‘a clear indication’ that they are fake, the NPA advised.
The UK’s FMD Working Group has also released interim advice on what pharmacists should do if their FMD software advises that a pack of medication has an error. The NPA will also be available for FMD advice via its call centre, it said.
The NPA’s head of corporate affairs, Gareth Jones, said that there will be ‘very few’ FMD compliant packs of medication in circulation by tomorrow and that some of these might return error messages from FMD software.
He said: ‘Unless there is a clear indication that the medicine is counterfeit, or there is some other significant overriding factor, then the medicine should be dispensed.
‘It will take some time for the rest of the medicines supply chain to fully comply.
In the meantime, our advice to members is they must be mindful of the relevant guidance and be making efforts to comply, but ultimately they must put their patients’ needs first.’
Have your say
Please add your comment in the box below. You can include links, but HTML is not permitted. Please note that comments are not moderated before publication and the views expressed are those of the user and do not reflect the views of The Pharmacist. Remember that submission of comments is governed by our Terms and Conditions. You can also read our full guidelines on article comments here – but please be aware that you are legally liable for any libellous or offensive comments that you make. If you have a complaint about a comment or are concerned that a comment breaches our terms and conditions, please use the ‘Report this comment’ function to alert our web team.