At the Chemist’s

Chemist's shop (a pharmacy in Great Britain, a drug store in the USA) is an institution of health service. It supplies the population with medicines and medical things. It is a place where a wide variety of articles is sold and prescription can be made; drugs are composed, dispensed, stored and sold. There are different types of chemist’s: municipal, public, private. Each chemist's shop has a chemist's department and a prescription one. All medicines are kept in drug cabinets, open shelves and refrigerators at a chemist’s.

At the chemist's department a person buys drugs ready to use, different things for medical care and medical herbs.

Poisonous, drastic, narcotic and psychotropic drugs are sold by prescription only at the prescription department. These drugs are potent and can be dangerous if taken in an overdose. Therefore, their use is strictly controlled.

In Great Britain all the drugs are legally divided into three groups: General Sales List (GSL, i.e. drugs for general sale); pharmacy medicines (i.e. drugs which are sold without prescription, but under the pharmacist’s control); prescription only medicines (POM, i.e. drugs sold by prescription only).

Every small bottle, a tube or a box of medicine has a label on it. White labels indicate drugs for internal use, yellow ones indicate drugs for external use and blue ones indicate drugs used for injections. The dose to be taken and the directions for the administration are also indicated on a label. Besides, all containers of dispensed medicines have the following particulars: name of the patient, name of the medicine, correct dosage instructions, date of dispensing, expiry date, warnings or contradictions, name and address of the pharmacy. It prevents confusing different remedies, some of which are poisonous. Their overdosage may cause unfavourable reactions and sometimes even death.

It’s interesting to compare the following fact: in Ukraine the prescription is usually written out by a physician, but in Great Britain and the USA a patient can receive the prescription form a nurse, a dentist, and even from a pharmacist. Depending on medical specialty of the prescriber, the prescriptions differ in colour.

The structure of a complete prescription includes six essential parts: the patient's name, the superscription, the inscription (the body of the prescription), the subscription, the signature and the prescriber's name.

In continental Europe, prescriptions are written out entirely in Latin abbreviations. The only exception is the signature which contains directions to the patients. That’s why European medical schools require up to two years of Latin as part of the curriculum for medical doctors and pharmacists.

In Great Britain all prescriptions are written out in the English language only. They don’t use any Latin abbreviations to avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding which might lead to serious consequences.

The realization of medicines is promoted by presenting the license given by the State Department of Quality and Safety Control and Production of Medicines and Medical articles.