Anschlussversorgung

Anschlussversorgung is the case in which a pharmacy continues a medication a person is already on, without a current prescription in front of it. It sits in paragraph 48a AMG and it is in force since 2 July 2026, the date the ApoVWG took effect. Of the two branches of Rx-Abgabe ohne Rezept, this is the one a pharmacy can actually work with today.

The conditions are narrow and they are the whole point of the rule. The medicine has to have been prescribed for that person across at least three quarters, which is the law's way of establishing that the therapy is genuinely running rather than new. Only the smallest available pack size may be handed out, so the handover bridges a gap instead of replacing a consultation. It is not repeatable. A second continuation is not available on the strength of the first one, and the person needs a new prescription before the next pack. Categories of medicine are excluded as well, including those that require monitoring and those with a high potential for abuse, which between them remove a good deal of what a pharmacy might otherwise have assumed was covered.

What the statute does not settle is the working detail. Who in the team may make the decision, how the three quarters are established and from which record, what has to be written down at the moment of handover, how long that documentation is kept and what the pharmacy has to be able to produce if it is asked later, all of that comes from the guidance published by the ABDA and by the Landesapothekerkammer rather than from the paragraph. A pharmacy that intends to use the rule should have that guidance in the house before the first case, not after it.

It is worth being clear about what Anschlussversorgung is not. It is a dispensing rule, not a pharmazeutische Dienstleistung, and it is not the acute case, which is the separate and not yet operable Akutversorgung. Whether any remuneration attaches to it, and on what terms, is not something the statute text answers, so that question belongs with the same guidance and with the pharmacy's own Verband rather than with an assumption.