Pharmacy Services Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-16 ============================================================ Maria McCormack (SF), Labour Panel I thank an tAire Stáit for coming in to talk about this. This is a decision I find deeply troubling, not just as a Senator but also as a pharmacy technician. I worked for more than ten years in pharmacy preparing these blister packs. I know exactly all the standard operating procedures that go on behind the scenes in preparing a blister pack. I also understand exactly the people who get the blister packs and rely on them. What I cannot get my head around is that the guidelines changed in 2017. I was working in pharmacy in 2017. I printed out the letter we got from the HSE in 2017. There was a list of four criteria that a patient needed to meet to get a medicine blister-packed. It is already nearly impossible for someone to qualify for a blister pack. The criteria are, first, at the request of a patient's physician; second, due to the inherent nature of a medicinal product, that is, product stability and shelf life; third, where a patient is commencing new drug therapy with a view to establishing patient tolerance and acceptability before continuing on a full treatment regimen; and, fourth, in exceptional circumstances, where the patient is incapable of safely and effectively managing the medication regimen. These four criteria have to be met to get pre-approval from the HSE before a patient can get their medication blister-packed. This small group of people are already in a very vulnerable position. We know they have been identified as needing to have the medication blister-packed as they would otherwise not manage their medication. This is where the service is being taken away. I genuinely cannot understand how the Government believes it is acceptable to introduce a charge for this service. I was thinking last night about all the different people I packed for. I was looking at the list of medications now covered and asking myself what a blind person will do now or what will a person with dementia or an intellectual disability do. I also have a 14-year-old daughter who takes medication and we need to have it blister-packed because of the GP stamp. This will now not be covered. She is 14 and I am a working mother. I am not there all the time. It is my only way of knowing if she took her medication safely. We can see here there are green pills. I am not going to go into what they are but one is a 20 mg tablet and one is a 10 mg tablet. I know from studying for two years to be a pharmacy technician the tiny difference in size between the two. These are complex medications and it is not fair to introduce this. Whether it is €20, €30 or €50 of a charge people cannot afford it at the minute. I have been inundated with calls from pharmacists and technicians I used to work with. I have also had a number of calls from diabetes nurses from the diabetes clinics because none of the diabetes medications are covered. What are they going to do now for compliance? People are not going to be able to afford the medications so they are just going to have to go without. What has baffled me even more is the list of medications that are on it. Where someone is on an antidepressant, an SSRI, for their mental health, that may be covered, but if they are on a heart or cholesterol medication, that is not covered. People are going to have some medication packed and some not. If you talk to any health professional, we know the danger that comes with that and the hoarding of medication in presses. Blister packs have changed so much of that. Any ambulance or emergency worker will tell you that when they go into a house, they will pick up the pack and they can see straight away the name, the date of birth and the medication. More importantly, they can also see if the person has taken the medication that day. It is one of these decisions that is going to cause avoidable admissions to our hospitals, and for families and carers this is a nightmare. I will have to pay to get my daughter's medication blister-packed, but what does someone who cannot afford it do? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-12-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-16