Delegating medication to a pharmacy is common practice in geriatric care.Find out here who is liable for errors in this case.Providing residents in inpatient long-term care with medication is fundamentally the task of the nursing home.There, registered nurses are responsible for preparing the medication – a job that is often done on night shifts.However, nursing homes do not have to prepare the medicines themselves - if the resident agrees, a pharmacy can also do this.It is up to the resident to decide which pharmacy performs this task.As a rule, the choice falls on the pharmacy that has the statutory supply contract with the home.The pharmacy is obliged to conclude a written contract with the operator of the nursing home for the supply of residents with medicines and medical products sold in pharmacies (paragraph 12a ApoG).Blister packaging by the pharmacy offers considerable advantages.For example, medication management reduces the risk of complications when administering medication.In addition, there is an interesting legal liability advantage for the nursing home: If the blister packaging is delegated to a pharmacy, the pharmacy is basically responsible for checking the composition of the medication.This does not absolve the institution or the nursing staff from any responsibility.But the responsibility is reduced to a so-called delegation responsibility.This means that when the facility delegates the compilation of the prescribed medication for the resident, it ensures that this supply is “on the whole” correct.This includes, on the one hand, a visual inspection (are the blisters undamaged and properly marked?) and, on the other hand, some of the blisters should be checked to see whether the number of tablets per resident corresponds to the prescription.The pharmacies are often willing to take on the task of blister packaging without remuneration.This saves the nursing home personnel costs.However, it is disputed to what extent the "taking along" of such savings effects by the nursing homes is permissible against the background of the corruption offenses paragraphs 299 a/b ff. StGB.In the healthcare sector, these prohibit the recommendation of another service provider, in this case the pharmacy, in return for advantages, in this case savings in personnel costs.There are voices in the legal literature that argue that there is an advantage if the preparation of the medication no longer takes place in-house but is delegated to the pharmacy.Others, on the other hand, believe that blister packaging in pharmacies is so common that it is not an unfair economic advantage and is therefore permissible.We tend to conclude that free blister packaging is permitted in Rhineland-Palatinate.The fact that the Rhineland-Palatinate professional code for pharmacists does not provide for an express ban (this is different in other federal states) speaks in favor of the admissibility of the free activity of the pharmacy in this context.If you want to be absolutely sure, you pay the pharmacy for the blistering work.As a rule, the pharmacy will still be able to offer the service more cheaply than the house itself. However, it would not be enough just to consider the saved working hours here.If you want to avoid an unfair advantage, the total costs must always be calculated.This includes not only the pure labor costs for the preparation of the medication, but also the costs of calculating the liability risk and, if necessary, storage in the case of external procurement.Milkmaid bills don't protect here.Text: Thorsten Müller and Jan Schabbeck