All hospital pharmacies in Europe will be under a legal obligation to implement new medicines verification requirements in 2018. The new requirements come as a result of the 2011 Falsified Medicines Directive. Further details of what this is likely to mean in practice for hospital pharmacists have recently been emerging.

The European Association of Hospital Pharmacy (EAHP) and its members remain seriously concerned about the implications and burden such obligations will place on hospital pharmacy, which across Europe already operates in resource-restrained environments.

The 2011 Directive gives only headline attention to what the pan-European verification system for medicines might consist of: a verification system based on unique identifiers linked to a repository. All of the details relating to the technical specifications, modalities and management of the new verification system are instead left to the European Commission to propose via a second set of regulations called a ‘Delegated …