Impfstatus

Two things make the Impfstatus a pharmacy question rather than only a practice question. Pharmacies may vaccinate within the limits set for them, so the record has to be checked before anything is given. The record itself is often the problem, because the booklet is lost, the dates are missing or the last entry is decades old.

A pharmacy has three permissions with the record and two firm prohibitions:

• A pharmacy may read the record and say plainly what is documented in it.
• It may compare the entries against the current STIKO recommendations.
• It may state plainly which vaccinations have no documentation at all.
• It may not fill a gap in the record with a guess.
• It may not decide from a blood value that a vaccination is unnecessary.

That last point is where laboratory work and vaccination advice get confused. An antibody measurement shows what is present in the blood on the day of the sample, so it is not a licence and it does not replace a documented vaccination. For most vaccines there is no threshold that can be read as protected or not protected, and where a measurement is genuinely informative the akkreditiertes Labor says so and states the Referenzbereich it applies.

The service side has to be checked before it is offered. Whether a particular vaccination belongs inside a pharmazeutische Dienstleistung, and who in the team may give it after which ärztliche Schulung, is set out in the rules rather than left to the pharmacy. A written note in the Standardarbeitsanweisung is the cheapest way to keep the answer the same across the whole team.

A vaccination given in a pharmacy has to be documented, and that documentation is what protects the pharmacy later. Five things belong in the record on the day, rather than reconstructed afterwards from memory:

• The name of the person who gave the vaccination belongs in the record.
• The vaccine that was given is named in full.
• The batch number of that vaccine is written down.
• The date of the vaccination belongs in the same entry.
• The consent of the customer is documented on the day.