Behandlungsvertrag

The Behandlungsvertrag is the legal relationship underneath a service, and it is easy to overlook because it is rarely a piece of paper. Under the German civil code an agreement of this kind obliges one side to perform a service according to the recognised standards of the field and to record what was done, while the other side owes the agreed fee. Applied to a pharmacy, that means the pharmacy owes a properly performed and properly documented service, while the person who booked it owes the fee that was agreed.

It is concluded when the offered service is accepted, which in everyday practice happens without anybody signing anything. A person books an appointment, arrives, is told what the service involves and what it costs, and agrees to go ahead, so the agreement exists from that moment and nothing further is required to bind either side.

A written form changes nothing about whether the agreement exists, though it changes a great deal about whether its terms can later be proved. That is the honest argument for putting the scope, the price and the limits of the service in writing before the service starts.

It is not the same document as consent, and treating the two as one is the mistake worth avoiding. Aufklärung und Einwilligung concerns the intervention itself, which means the person understood what would be done to their body and agreed to it, and without it the intervention is unlawful however sound the commercial agreement was. The Behandlungsvertrag concerns the service relationship, which means who owes what to whom, so the two are separate questions with separate records and in practice separate signatures where signatures are collected at all.

Three duties follow from the agreement, and all three matter in the daily work of a pharmacy:

• The duty of care is measured against what a competent pharmacy would do, which is why written procedures and honest documentation matter, and it is the yardstick for Haftung if something goes wrong.
• The documentation duty is owed to the person receiving the service as well as to the pharmacy itself.
• Where the service is a pharmazeutische Dienstleistung the person owes no fee at all, because the fee is claimed from the pDL fund on a Sonderbeleg. The duties of care and documentation still apply exactly as they would if the person had paid an invoice.