Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will move on to the second part of the Bill, which is about pharmacists being able to provide medicines without a prescription. Are we not behind the times regarding the way we deal with this? I have a bank card and can go anywhere in the world with it and get access to my bank account. If I go into three different hospitals in Cork, there is a paper file for me in each of them. When are we going to have a card whereby if I go into a pharmacy, the pharmacy can check that I have not already gone into five, six or ten other different pharmacies? That is the danger of allowing pharmacies to provide medication without a prescription. I know pharmacists will be very careful about this but why can we not have a card system? I have been talking about this, as have others, for the past ten years. Denmark introduced it in 1996 and we still do not have a system whereby somebody has a patient medication card when he or she goes into hospital or pharmacy or to a GP. We are doing nothing about it. Why is this the case?