Stepanov said when antibiotics will be sold only by prescription / GORDON

Next year in Ukraine, antibiotics may begin to be sold only with an electronic prescription. Ukraine’s Health Minister Maxim Stepanov said this in a briefing on December 22, the correspondent of the publication “GORDON” reports.

“I have repeatedly spoken about this problem. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, our use of antibiotics has increased dramatically and we are doing some explanatory work as it is very bad for you, dear patients, when you start taking antibiotics without a prescription. What are we going to do? We believe that antibiotics should be sold by electronic prescription. We are developing a module under this system with electronic prescriptions and we hope that as of April 1 it will start working first with insulins, with drugs for immunosuppression and narcotics. And the next step will be antibiotics, which will be sold exclusively by electronic prescription. We believe that drugs cannot be sold without a prescription, ”he said.

The Minister said that within the current regulatory framework, the Ministry of Health is strengthening control over the sale of antibiotics in pharmacies and prescriptions.

“For example, prescriptions, which are now written on paper, must be kept in pharmacies for a year so that the State Drug Service can verify the sale of antibiotics at any time,” he said.

Stepanov urged not taking antibiotics without a prescription.

In November, Ukraine’s medical director Viktor Lyashko said that the use of some groups of antibiotics in 2020 increased almost 40 times. The uncontrolled use of antibiotics generates resistance, the doctor warned.

An outbreak of coronavirus infection began in late 2019 in China. March 11, 2020 World Health Organization declared the spread of the coronavirus a pandemic… Since the beginning of the epidemic in Ukraine, COVID-19 was confirmed in 979506 people, 16,897 patients died, 600 288 recovered.