asked the Minister for Local Government and Public Health if he will indicate the local authorities to which he has intimated that his Department does not approve of the practice of doctors in dispensaries and institutions prescribing patent medicines for patients, and also the action taken in the matter by the local authorities concerned.
Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. - Prescription of Patent Medicines.
A circular letter on this matter was sent to each board of assistance on the 13th ultimo. It did not prohibit the use of patent medicines entirely. It pointed out that several patent and proprietary medicines were being requisitioned for patients while medicines of at least equal standard and quality could be obtained from the prescribed list of medicines, and it was laid down in the circular that when a proprietary preparation is requisitioned in future, a statement must be enclosed showing the necessity for such item and why an efficient substitute cannot be selected from the prescribed list. Boards of assistance are expected to take action accordingly.
Arising out of the reply, is it conceivably the intention of the Department to preclude dispensary doctors from purchasing proprietary preparations of such firms as Parke Davis, Burroughs Wellcome and Crooke's and force them back to compounding from raw drugs?
I think the Deputy did not follow my reply.
Very closely.
It is not the intention of the Department to prohibit the use of patent medicines, but officers responsible for prescribing these medicines are being asked to state why particular patent medicines are selected and prescribed, in preference to the articles and medicines set out in the prescribed list. That is all they are asked to do. If the Department is satisfied that there is full justification for prescribing particular medicines not on the prescribed list, there would be no objection.
Surely the Parliamentary Secretary, who is himself a doctor, agrees that physicians in rural Ireland are much safer and wiser in using proprietary preparations of well-known wholesale druggists, than the unstandardised drugs which are sold to the central purchasing authority, nominally conforming with the British pharmacopoeia requirements but, in fact, having behind them no guarantee, such as the proprietary preparations of Burroughs Welcome, Crooke's and Parke Davis.
That aspect of the matter will be borne in mind when a decision on a particular application will be under review.
Surely the Minister cannot take the view that it is desirable to put every individual doctor in this State, and in the service of a local authority, under the obligation of submitting a requisition with each application for drugs, when the Parliamentary Secretary knows of his own knowledge that practitioners would be wiser to make a selection?
The Deputy apparently assumes that patent medicines are not already on the prescribed list. That is a wrong assumption. The prescribed list includes well-recognised remedies, and the purpose of the circular was to ensure that there would not be wholesale substitution of patent medicines for remedies already on the prescribed list, and that when a doctor departed from the prescribed list, in future, he would be asked to say why. Presumably, he would depart from the prescribed list on his own experience of a particular remedy. He would be asked to state the reasons why he selected that particular remedy in preference to a remedy on the prescribed list.
May I ask if, between now and the time that the Department's Estimate is discussed in the Dáil, this matter will be further investigated? I would like to have an opportunity of dealing with it in greater detail?