Legal nature of pharmaceutical care in Poland—health benefit or pharmaceutical service?

This article discusses the legal nature of pharmaceutical care in Poland. The purpose of this article is an attempt to determine the status of pharmaceutical care after the enactment of the Pharmaceutical Profession Act. The separation of pharmaceutical care from pharmaceutical services in this Act aims to emphasize its priority in fulfilling the social mission of the pharmacy. However, from the Pharmaceutical Law Act (Journal of Laws of 2024 item 686) it can be inferred that pharmaceutical care remains as a part of the pharmaceutical services provided in a pharmacy. The presentation of the article’s topic was made using literature on pharmaceutical law (analysis and critique of literature). Additionally, texts of individual acts and governmental drafts of their justifications were necessary for explaining detailed issues. The basic research method adopted in this work is the linguistic-logical analysis of legal texts (also known as the dogmatic-legal method or document analysis), i.e., the texts of acts included in various parts of the work and, where necessary, the case law of administrative courts. The conducted analysis leads to the conclusion that it is difficult to qualify pharmaceutical care as a service with a uniform status. There is currently no obstacle to treating pharmaceutical care both as a pharmaceutical service and a health benefit in order to obtain public funding for pharmaceutical care.