World Pharmacists Week: Statements Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24 ============================================================ Pádraig Rice (SD), Cork South-Central It has; that is great. There has been some real progress and that should be acknowledged and welcomed by both the Minister and her predecessor. It is important that work is happening and it is good to mark it on World Pharmacists Day. As we know, Sláintecare has a strong emphasis on enhancing public health and prevention and the delivery of an integrated healthcare system. Pharmacists have an important role to play in the delivery of these aims. When it comes to public health and prevention, they are already engaged in health promotion, screening and vaccinations but they are capable of more, particularly in the area of prevention. Take, for example, HIV prevention. There is an urgent need to expand access to PrEP into other clinical and community-based settings. The State’s current PrEP programme is too restrictive. We only have 13 public PrEP services. Of the 26 counties served by the PrEP programme, 16 have no public location to access PrEP, while of the 38 private providers of PrEP 33 are based in Dublin. Community pharmacists are part of the solution to these regional inequalities and we need to expand the breadth of healthcare staff eligible to provide PrEP services, and that includes pharmacists. The Sexual Health Strategy commits to: Explore and where possible, implement the best ways to enable wider, timely access to PEP, out-of-hours and for people living at a distance from public STI clinics, e.g, through online solutions, availability through pharmacists and primary care services, following necessary legislative change. Thus it is in the strategy that pharmacists could engage in this work and it would be great to hear from the Minister about where this commitment stands and if any progress has been made since the strategy was published last year. In my capacity as Chair of the health committee I received quite a concerning letter from the Gay Health Network, which represents many of the organisations advocating on sexual health. It said "...despite repeated engagement over almost two years, the South East remains without a publicly accessible PrEP service". That is an entire region without access to a public PrEP service in the south east. The Gay Health Network and others have tried to engage with the HSE on this. They have written and I understand they have not received responses. The network said in its letter that "People living in the South East continue to be denied equitable access to a nationally funded HIV prevention programme that has been available elsewhere in Ireland for several years". There are therefore real concerns about health inequalities and access to prevention. Pharmacists are part of the solution and that issue in the south east needs to be urgently addressed . There should be engagement with the organisations that have been advocating because to date that has not been adequate. Looking at these issues again is on the draft agenda of the health committee. The other area we have seen progress is the introduction of the common conditions service, which has certainly been a positive development. This service allows for pharmacists to assess symptoms and prescribe treatment for eight common conditions, including thrush, shingles and cold sores. However, my problem with this service is every patient must pay for it. The consultation fee is not reimbursed by the State, even if you have a medical card. Earlier this year the Irish Independent reported pharmacists are charging between €30 and €35for this service and any medicines prescribed comes with an additional cost. I accept the medicine cost can be reimbursable if a patient avails of a HSE community drug scheme and that this new common conditions service is still cheaper than visiting a GP if you do not have a medical card or GP visit card. However, why would anyone with a medical card or GP visit card pay for the common conditions service when they could see their GP for free? This undercuts the main reason for thecommon conditions service, which is to divert people away from overstretched GP services. There is an access issue there that needs to be addressed. When the Irish Pharmacy Union first proposed this scheme it estimated nearly 1 million GP consultations for medical card patients could be dealt with more appropriately by a pharmacist. We all know there is a problem with how overstretched GP services are and there is a solution here to free up GPs and provide better access to the common conditions service for people with medical cards. At a minimum medical card patients should be able to avail of the common conditions service free of charge. That is something the Minister might take away and have a think about. Last time we were here we talked about contraception and I will take this opportunity to again raise the matter of prescription-free oral contraceptives. As I have said previously, the World Health Organization recommends prescription-free access to oral contraceptives. This includes both combined oral contraceptives and progestogen-only pills. This would still be treated as behind-the-counter pharmacy access requiring eligibility screening by trained pharmacists before being dispensed. We must remember pharmacists are highly trained healthcare professionals and they should be allowed to operate at the top of their licence. Community pharmacists have been providing emergency contraception prescription-free since 2011 and real consideration should be given to extending this to oral contraception. This would make the process faster and easier for women and further alleviate pressure on GPs. It would be particularly beneficial for those who are not eligible for the free contraception scheme as it would reduce the cost. It has been three years since the Irish Pharmacy Union told the Oireachtas health committee: "There is no clinical reason for oral contraceptives to be supplied only on foot of a prescription; with proper protocols this is a very safe and effective healthcare intervention." The previous health committee endorsed that call from the IPU and wrote to the then Minister for Health on it, urging him to allow direct access to oral contraceptives through community pharmacies. I ask the Minister to look at that one as well. Also on the topic of contraceptives, there is a need to expand the free contraception scheme in the upcoming budget. The scheme is currently available to women aged 17 to 35 but we know from the National Women's Council and others that age is a barrier to accessing that. In the area of vaccinations, community pharmacists now administer one in every three vaccines under the flu and Covid vaccination programmes but there is scope there for further expansion to utilise those services to the maximum. I thank all the pharmacists around the country for their work, dedication and for the services they provide. They are a vital part of communities and provide accessible and trusted services to people. They are central to the delivery of an integrated care healthcare system as envisioned under Sláintecare. --- 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/dail/2026-09-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-24