Spain rules out using pharmacies to ramp up vaccination roll-out

Spain rules out using pharmacies to ramp up vaccination roll-out.

WHILE the likes of France and Italy have enlisted the help of pharmacists to accelerate their vaccination campaigns, the Ministry of Health has stated it doesn’t feel it’s necessary in Spain.

In Spain, between 35 and 38 million doses will be supplied until June 30, according to the latest estimates.

But when quizzed on whether Spain would make use of other professionals to speed up the vaccination process, Health Minister Carolina Darias said that it is “the autonomous communities that have the powers in the vaccination process and those that will organise their resources to accelerate it.”

However, she stressed that if a community wanted to use a pharmacy to administer the jab, it would need a regulatory change that must be carried out by the Ministry (as happened with the diagnostic tests).

She said that “it would be worth more than a Royal Decree-law within the current context,” reports elEconomista.

It has also been argued that Spain’s national health service has “responded to the doses that have arrived” and that every week “practically all those that arrive are administered.”

Therefore, the Ministry does not consider the pharmacy route necessary, as “addressing a legislative change has a more problematic background.”

Each time the pharmacy has tried to join a health action, it has been “encountered with rejection from nurses, who consider it an invasion of skills.”

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