There are now 546 municipalities in Poland without a single pharmacy, while another 687 have only one. Since the market peaked in 2017, as many as 2,247 pharmacies have disappeared.
During a meeting of the parliamentary team examining the deregulation of the pharmacy market, the Franchise Pharmacy Association, or ZAF, presented a package of proposals prepared by pharmacy-sector employers. The measures are intended to reverse the negative trend and include allowing pharmacies to be inherited and sold, enabling permits to be transferred when premises are lost, and introducing fair competition rules.
A Fire or Terminated Lease Can Make a Pharmacy Disappear Permanently
One of the clearest examples of the shortcomings of the current regulations is the ban on relocating pharmacies. A pharmacy moved to new premises is treated as an entirely new business, while a new pharmacy cannot be established if another one operates within a 500-metre radius. This rule applies even when the pharmacy being relocated has served the same area for 20 years.
“If a pharmacy burns down and the pharmacist finds new premises 50 metres away, the law tells them they cannot reopen. Patients lose a trusted pharmacy not for economic reasons, but purely because of formal restrictions. Nobody benefits — not the patient, the pharmacist or the state budget. We propose maintaining the continuity of the permit when a pharmacy changes premises because the owner has lost the legal right to occupy the property or because the premises have been destroyed. This is a simple change that would significantly help both patients and pharmacists,” said Mariusz Kisiel, president of the Franchise Pharmacy Association.
Succession: A Lifetime’s Investment Expires With the Permit
The second proposal put forward by ZAF concerns removing the barriers to succession. The owner of an independent pharmacy is currently unable to sell the business to anyone outside a narrow group of pharmacists. In practice, the pharmacy also cannot be transferred to the owner’s children unless they have chosen pharmacy as their profession.
“A pharmacist approaching retirement whose children work in other professions currently has three options: sell the pharmacy for a fraction of its value to another pharmacist — provided they can find one and that person can afford it — close it down, or die while still holding the permit. An asset that may be worth several million zlotys and has been built up over decades loses its value because demand has been eliminated by law. It amounts to expropriation without compensation, only spread over time,” Kisiel said.
“We want a genuine possibility to sell and inherit a pharmacy together with its permit, while strictly maintaining the requirement for a qualified pharmacist to manage the business and retaining full supervision by the pharmaceutical inspectorate. Patient safety is ensured by the regulations governing the pharmacy profession, not by the ownership structure,” he added.
Fair Competition: Enforcement Instead of Prohibitions
Pharmacy businesses are currently subject to two conflicting anti-concentration limits, one of which ZAF describes as artificial.
The association proposes introducing a clear and transparent regional concentration limit, based on the Italian model. Following a reform introduced in Italy in 2017, a single owner may control no more than 20% of pharmacies in a province.
According to analyses by the Institute of Public Finance, introducing such a threshold in Poland could increase the number of pharmacies by approximately 660 over the next 15 years. Maintaining the current regulations, by contrast, could lead to a further decline of around 750 pharmacies.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Such mechanisms already operate in Europe and only need to be appropriately adapted to the Polish market.
What a State-Funded Rescue Plan Would Not Fix
During the parliamentary team’s work, a second and entirely different proposal was also presented.
While the ZAF plan focused on deregulation, improving access to pharmacies, increasing competition in the sector and preventing excessive price increases, a competing proposal presented by the National Association of Pharmacy Employers, known as ZAPPA, contained radical measures that would impose further restrictions on an already heavily constrained market.
ZAPPA proposed introducing a new tax on pharmacies equal to 2% of their turnover. According to critics, such a measure could lead to the collapse of several thousand additional pharmacies within a relatively short period.
Representatives of the Chamber of Pharmacists have previously indicated that as many as 30% of pharmacies have faced profitability problems.[1] An additional tax could therefore become the final blow for many businesses.
Fewer pharmacies mean reduced access to medicines and higher prices. Prices of non-reimbursed medicines are already increasing several times faster than inflation.
Recent studies reportedly show that as many as half of residents in areas where pharmacy closures are most severe decide not to buy medicines they need. An increasing number of people simply cannot afford them.
In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Ministry of Health stated that the number of unfilled prescription items increased by 22 million between 2020 and 2024.
Another ZAPPA proposal involves a form of market nationalisation through the establishment of a state-owned company that would acquire failing pharmacies. Critics describe this as an unprecedented idea that would set the market back by several decades.
They argue that the pharmacy market could become inefficient and underfunded, similarly to the public healthcare system. However, the proposal also illustrates the difficult situation currently facing pharmacists and patients.
“A regulation that requires a state-funded rescue operation is a bad regulation. If a state-owned company is being proposed to acquire pharmacies, along with a PLN 500 million loan fund financed from the state budget, the authors of these ideas are effectively admitting that the market cannot maintain pharmacies where they are needed under the current rules,” Kisiel said.
“The problem of areas without access to pharmacies will continue to grow. Small municipalities lack pharmacies, while 24-hour pharmacies are closing in major cities. Significantly, the state-owned company would be exempt from restrictions that apply to every other market participant,” he added.
“We cannot afford to use public money to address the consequences of bad legislation. Nor can we afford to impose another tax on pharmacies, many of which are already unprofitable and unable to obtain external investment. What we can afford is good legislation and sensible deregulation,” Kisiel concluded.
Pharmacy-Sector Proposals Presented by ZAF
The proposals presented by pharmacy businesses during the meeting of the parliamentary team examining pharmacy-market regulation include:
- maintaining the continuity of a pharmacy permit when a pharmacy is moved to other premises because the operator has lost the legal right to occupy the original property or because the premises have been destroyed;
- allowing a pharmacy to be sold or inherited together with its permit, while retaining the requirement for a qualified pharmacist to manage the business and maintaining supervision by the pharmaceutical inspectorate;
- introducing a transparent regional concentration limit based on the Italian model;
- exempting businesses from the administrative permit fee when they intend to open a pharmacy in a municipality where no pharmacy currently operates;
- retaining geographical and demographic restrictions as an incentive to establish pharmacies in areas where they are most needed;
- removing restrictions introduced in 2023 that ZAF considers unconstitutional and which, according to the association, intensified the deterioration of the pharmacy market that began with the 2017 “Pharmacy for the Pharmacist” legislation.
[1] Rynek Zdrowia: “30% of pharmacies in Poland are unprofitable. Pharmacy students are transferring to nursing faculties.”
Source: CEO.com.pl
