Hyderabad Patients Face Extra Costs as Chemists Resist Cutting Medicine Strips

Patients across Hyderabad continue to face avoidable out-of-pocket expenses because retail pharmacies refuse to cut medicine blister packs, forcing customers to purchase full strips regardless of the actual dosage prescribed.

While the Union Health Ministry's Drugs Consultative Committee (DCC) recently urged pharmacies to dispense exact prescription quantities rather than compelling full-strip sales, the move has met with resistance from retail chemists citing strict drug regulatory hurdles.

According to the All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists (AIOCD), cutting blister packs creates regulatory compliance issues. Under current regulations, critical information including batch numbers, manufacturing dates, and expiry dates are printed only once across the full outer strip. When a strip is cut to sell loose tablets, this identifying information is lost, and drug regulators do not permit pharmacies to maintain unlabelled loose medication.

Financial constraints also discourage retailers from breaking packages. Pharma companies and distributors only accept expired or unsold stock returns in full, intact strips. T Srinivas, a senior office bearer of Druggists Associations in Hyderabad, noted that small medical shop owners cannot absorb the financial loss of holding unsellable partial strips.

Proposed solutions to resolve the issue include mandating pharmaceutical companies to manufacture smaller packs of three, five, or seven pills to match standard prescription lengths. Other proposals suggest printing batch and expiry details behind every individual pill blister, amending the Drugs and Cosmetics Act to establish a legal framework for strip-cutting, and requiring distributors to accept returned partial packs.