This is one of the many gray areas that persist at the start of this meteorological winter, which is synonymous with increased risk of power outages in the coming weeks. Will pharmacies be subject to load shedding in the same way as homes and other structures in your geographic area? The question occupies the minds of professionals in the sector, especially with regard to the cold chain that could be broken if necessary.
Therefore, the Ministry of Health must precisely provide professionals with a list detailing the procedure to follow product by product. For his part, the president of the Union of Community Pharmacists (USPO), Pierre-Olivier Variot, recalls that insurance does not cover these possible losses. “There is also a security risk because most pharmacies have automated doors and in the event of a power outage they will be open at all costs,” he stresses, advocating the presence of a gendarme to avoid any risk of robbery. Finally, the union representative considers that the Regional Health Agencies (ASR) should warn the inhabitants of the affected territories of the impossibility of access to medicines, some of which require that pharmacists be able to use their computer tools.
The question is not “should I?” but we can?”
Therefore, pharmacists are already considering solutions to deal with this risk, but most of them only relate to the medium and long term and cannot be implemented by the winter of 2022-2023. “A generator seems inappropriate because it requires a lot of electrical work so that it turns off automatically as soon as power is restored,” laments Pierre-Olivier Variot. “It requires space and capacity to store gasoline,” adds Philippe Besset, who prefers to opt for inverters to keep refrigerators at a certain temperature by transforming direct current into alternating current instead of producing electricity.
However, it is too late to purchase such machines and ensure their operation in the rapidly approaching crucial period. For the unions of the sector, the only viable option in the short term is the inclusion of pharmacies among the priority sites exempt from load shedding, but therefore with a technical problem. “For the government, the question is not ‘should we?’, but ‘can we?’, because EDF is not sure that it is possible to save such a small area during load shedding,” explains Philippe Besset.
Upstream of the 20,000 pharmacies in France, it is also the pharmaceutical companies that produce medicines and vaccines that could also suffer from the situation. “There is a risk throughout the drug chain,” summarizes Pierre-Olivier Variot. Although the departmental prefectures, who determine the priority sites, have already been contacted, Matignon also seized the issue and should soon publish an inter-ministerial circular to decide.
Source: BFM TV
