Status: 19/10/2022 20:06
Anyone who still needed medication from the pharmacy on Wednesday may have been standing behind closed doors in the afternoon. The pharmacists had been called by their professional associations to go on strike.
The pharmacist associations were satisfied with the response. “It’s going very well,” said the managing director of the Schleswig-Holstein Pharmacists Association and Hamburg Pharmacists Association, Georg Zwenke, the German news agency in the afternoon. The motivation of pharmacists, frustrated by the high costs, is very high. The strike was about money, more specifically the pharmacy fee incurred for prescription drugs. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) wants to cut this amount by around 120 million euros a year over the next year – by the way, with the same law that panel doctors are already protesting.
Hamburg pharmacies face a loss of millions
As a result, Hamburg pharmacies would receive 2.7 million euros less. For the city’s 375 pharmacies, that’s an average of over € 7,000 per year, Zwenke calculated. Particularly affected are pharmacies, which make less money on cosmetics, throat drops and other over-the-counter products and mainly fill prescriptions. And they are often found in neighborhoods where the supply is worse anyway, Zwenke said.
Customers understand the strike
Customers understood the action, as Zenke announced. Numerous pharmacists tried to speak to them to clarify the situation. Pharmacies that did not take part in the strike also drew attention to this with leaflets. You’ve worked the edge since the corona pandemic, she said. Furthermore, the general economic conditions were becoming more difficult day by day. The planned tariff cut is putting national, local and high-quality supply of medicines at great risk.
Emergency pharmacies not affected by the strike
Pharmacists have also been called to strike in other federal states. In the north, this affected Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, as well as Brandenburg and Saarland. Emergency pharmacies were exempted from the strike. “We do not want to paralyze the supply, we want to educate the population,” said the association of pharmacists.
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