The new law may leave the small towns of Russia without pharmacies

One point per entrepreneur

From September 1, 2022, most pharmacies in the regions may be at risk of closure – the new regulation on licensing pharmaceutical activities, which comes into force, allows each individual entrepreneur to license no more than one pharmacy outlet. It would seem – nonsense. But this provision can completely destroy pharmacies in small towns and villages of the country, that is, in places that are of no interest to large federal chains. And completely deprive the local population of access to vital medicines. MK understood the situation.

In July, individual entrepreneurs began to receive from Roszdravnadzor that the new regulation would come into force very soon. “If you are an individual entrepreneur, then you can have only one pharmacy, and several pharmacies can only have an LLC,” participants in profile chats in Telegram channels note. Lawyers say that the regulation really does not make it possible to open an individual entrepreneur more than one pharmacy. In theory, the document should only apply to the opening of new pharmacies, however, according to representatives of the pharmacy industry, some representatives of regulatory authorities in the regions make unofficial statements about the possible cancellation of existing pharmaceutical licenses for individual entrepreneurs with more than one retail outlet.

At the same time, as the SRO “Association of Independent Pharmacies” said, the draft document, which was posted for public discussion, including with the participation of the professional community, did not contain such a restriction. By the way, two years earlier, individual entrepreneurs were also excluded from the distance selling of medicines. And now a new blow has been prepared for small businesses, from where they were not expected. “Small businesses are supported with all their might, they are not allowed to expand. They give us away quietly,” says Marina, the owner of a pharmacy in Smolensk. “And this is at a time when we hear on every corner about supporting small businesses, preserving jobs, the availability of essential goods for the population. It turns out that if the owner of the pharmacy starts its redevelopment or allows tenants, it will be necessary to reissue the license – and the individual entrepreneur will lose such a pharmacy, ”says one of the participants in the chat of pharmacists and pharmacists.

As Natalya Zudina, an individual entrepreneur from Tula, who has 6 small pharmacy points in the villages of the Kursk region, told MK, her small business seems to have come to an end: “Almost all pharmacy IP today work in small towns, villages, on the outskirts of cities, in regional centers. Federal networks have been operating in city centers for a long time – and we have already been ousted from there. Nobody is interested in our pharmacy points – we are engaged in providing the population with medicines in hard-to-reach places, there is not much profit to be made here. Once in such settlements, feldsher-obstetric stations (FAPs) provided medicines to residents, but after the collapse of the USSR, they also collapsed, and people were left without access to essential goods. They began to complain, asking the administration to open pharmacies for them. But the federal networks were not interested. Therefore, pharmacies began to open individual entrepreneurs. We are residents of such cities, and we know what is in demand by the local population. And if now we, as individual entrepreneurs, are forbidden to open new pharmacy points, the people will again be left without medicines, and we will be infringed on our rights, because we will not open anything new. We will stay with those small pharmacy points that we have. I have 6 pharmacy points, and there were plans to open two more in the same small villages. Now those plans have failed. The problems in the regions are almost the same for all. We know very well that large chains want to push us out of this market. Today, many people from small towns are already forced to go to regional centers to buy medicines, and it will be even worse.”

As Viktoria Presnyakova, director of the Association of Independent Pharmacies, told MK, much attention was paid to pharmacy organizations in Soviet times: there was a single control center in which all real statistics were accumulated, issues of drug defects were quickly resolved, requests for the manufacture of new drugs were recorded, dosage forms, scientific and educational work was carried out in the direction of “Pharmacy”, etc. In the post-Soviet period, the pharmacy direction was forced to rebuild. The influence of the economic factor led to the fact that the pharmacy business was clearly divided into small (medium) regional and large federal chains. “We have repeatedly said that pharmacy organizations in the regions, including hard-to-reach and sparsely populated, are represented mainly by small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. And the need to support them both in the context of the pandemic and as a result of sanctions measures is very high. From an economic point of view, small business in a number of industries is more organic and profitable, as it has a more flexible adjustment mechanism in changing conditions. However, individual entrepreneurs who open pharmacies in regions that are of no interest to large pharmacy chains, who work on sheer enthusiasm and meet their obligations with all their property, cause an extremely negative reaction from regulatory authorities. And now the new Regulation on Licensing Pharmaceutical Activities does not allow an individual entrepreneur to open more than one pharmacy. The most unpleasant thing in this situation is that the draft document, which was posted for public discussion, including by the professional community, did not contain such a restriction,” says Victoria Presnyakova.

Pharmacists believe that if the state is interested in debugging the drug supply system for the able-bodied population (not only in privileged categories), participation in this system of professional personnel, development of small and medium-sized businesses in the regions as a whole, and not just cities of federal significance, then the adoption of such measures is unacceptable . They have already written appeals to the Ministry of Economic Development and the Commissioner for the Protection of the Rights of Entrepreneurs, but there is no answer yet.