Marcin Repelewicz, head of the Lower Silesian Pharmaceutical Chamber, said pharmacies faced difficulties handling prescriptions for a total of around five hours, with some patients unable to fill them.
The chamber said earlier in the day that a Europe-wide failure of the PLMVS drug verification system significantly slowed or in some cases prevented patient service. The disruption affected both pharmacies and pharmaceutical wholesalers, with outages reported in Austria, France, Norway, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, the Netherlands and Slovakia.
A second outage occurred before 1500 local time and lasted several dozen minutes.
Repelewicz said a failure on this scale could paralyze the operation of community pharmacies, noting that the legally required verification of prescription medicines was unavailable, creating problems for roughly 11,000 pharmacies nationwide.
The chamber said it would investigate the causes of the outages and provide updates, including positions from other institutions.
PLMVS is part of the European medicines verification system overseen in Poland by the National Medicines Verification Organisation.
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Source: IAR