Community pharmacy visit

Today we visited a community pharmacy, Premium Pharmacy. Here in Thailand, the pharmacy process is very different than back in the U.S. Many medications you would get monthly from the hospitals instead of going to the community pharmacy. While walking down the street, you pass many pharmacies and you can just walk in and purchase medications without a prescription, some examples are sertraline, Augmentin, birth control, and Azithromycin. In order to buy them, there has to be a pharmacist on duty. When the pharmacist is not present, they have to pull down the shades which means that those drugs cannot be sold until the pharmacist returns. I thought it was interesting because Tylenol 500 mg is put behind the counter, which we can buy without talking to a pharmacist.

 There are also 4 major things that pharmacies must have:
1. The pharmacy must have a minimum of 8 square meters.
2. They have to have a refrigerator (if they carry medications that need to be refrigerated), at least 2 counting trays, one for NSAID's and one for the others. If they have medications that people may have allergies to, they need a separate counting tray for them too. They have to have a blood pressure machine (pharmacists can only use the electronic ones), a scale and a fire extinguisher.
3. There has to be at least 2 personelle, one of them being a pharmacist. The pharmacist must wear a white coat to distinguish them from the other workers.
4. Lastly, they need to follow medication quality control which means that they can't have expired drugs and they can't have drugs that are not registered with the Thai FDA.