Akutversorgung

Akutversorgung is the second and less advanced branch of Rx-Abgabe ohne Rezept. It is set out in paragraph 48b AMG and it covers the acute situation, meaning the person who needs a prescription only medicine now and cannot reach a prescriber in time. The paragraph is real and it is in the statute book, but the mechanism behind it is not operable.

The statute leaves the substance to be filled in, because the BfArM has to issue implementing recommendations and it has until 2 July 2027 to do so. That deadline sets the earliest realistic start at the summer of 2027, and only if the recommendations are published on time and are workable as written. A pharmacy that reads a headline about being allowed to supply in an emergency and concludes that it may do so this year has misread the position. Nothing in the paragraph is usable at the counter until the recommendations exist.

That makes Akutversorgung a term to understand instead of a service to build, and the useful work in the meantime is mostly about not confusing it with the branch that already applies. Anschlussversorgung has been in force since 2 July 2026, it covers the continuation of a chronic therapy, and it has its own narrow conditions. The acute case is a different situation under a different paragraph on a different timetable, so the team has to be able to tell a customer which of the two is being discussed.

What the recommendations will require is not something to guess at, though the likely shape of the rule is already visible:

• A defined acute situation is expected to be one of the conditions.
• A limited quantity of the medicine is likely to be set.
• Some form of documentation and follow up towards a prescriber is expected as well.

The detail will be set by the BfArM recommendations and then interpreted for practice in the guidance from the ABDA and the Landesapothekerkammer. A pharmacy following the Apothekenreform should watch for those two documents and treat everything published before them as provisional. Writing a procedure now would mean writing it twice, because the version written in advance is the one most likely to be wrong once the requirements are published.

The sensible position on the acute case is attention instead of implementation. The rest of the ApoVWG is the opposite, because those changes took effect on 2 July 2026 and that work is already due.