Rx-Abgabe ohne Rezept

Rx-Abgabe ohne Rezept is not one permission. It is the umbrella term that has settled on the small number of cases in which a prescription only medicine may be handed over even though no valid prescription is in front of the person dispensing it. Two separate rules sit underneath the term, they were written into the Arzneimittelgesetz in the same reform, and they arrived on different timetables.

The first is Anschlussversorgung, paragraph 48a AMG, the continuation of a chronic medication the person is already taking. It is in force since 2 July 2026, the day the ApoVWG took effect, so a pharmacy can work with it now. It is drawn tightly. The medicine has to have been prescribed across at least three quarters, only the smallest pack size may be handed out, there is no repeat without a new prescription, and whole categories of medicine are excluded, among them those that need monitoring and those with a high potential for abuse.

The second is Akutversorgung, paragraph 48b AMG, supply in an acute situation. That paragraph exists in the statute, but the mechanism behind it is not operable. The BfArM has to issue implementing recommendations by 2 July 2027, which puts the practical start in the summer of 2027 at the earliest. Until those recommendations exist, a pharmacy has a term to understand rather than a service to run.

What neither rule gives is a general power to dispense on pharmaceutical judgement. Both are exceptions written for a defined situation, and both leave the prescription as the normal route to a prescription only medicine. The consequence for a pharmacy reading about the Apothekenreform in the trade press is that the two cases have to be kept apart in the team's head, because one of them is live and one of them is not. Blurring them produces either a handover that should not have happened or a refusal that did not need to happen.

The operational layer sits outside the statute text. Who may decide, what has to be recorded, how the case is documented and what the pharmacy has to be able to show afterwards are set out in the guidance from the ABDA and the Landesapothekerkammer, and that guidance is where a pharmacy should start before it relies on either rule at the counter.