Uzbekistan's Ministry of Health proposed rules for the online sale of over-the-counter medicines

What is proposed to change

The Ministry of Health of Uzbekistan has proposed regulating the online sale of over-the-counter medicines and medical products. The draft resolution has been published on the portal for discussing regulatory legal acts, reported the outlet Spot.uz. The document is a series of amendments to the regulation on the circulation of medicines and medical products: they cover requirements for the transportation and wholesale distribution of products, as well as the procedure for selling them through e-commerce channels.

Who will be able to sell and what

According to the amendments, only over-the-counter medicines and medical equipment from a list approved by the Ministry of Health will be allowed to be sold online. Only licensed pharmacies and their branches will be able to sell online with equipped order pickup points. To do this, they will need to create their own website or mobile app, or conclude an agreement with an order aggregator or a marketplace.

Requirements for information and delivery

The platform used for online sales must provide basic information about the pharmacy: full name, TIN, addresses, contact details, and license information — number, validity period, and issuing authority. For each medicine, the seller must disclose the international nonproprietary name, dosage and instructions for use, expiration date, stock availability, retail price, and trade markup. Consumers must also have access to information about analogues of the medicines and about the payment procedure, cost, delivery time, and conditions. Orders may be delivered by the pharmacies themselves or by other companies under an agreement; the transport must maintain the required storage conditions, and medicines with different transportation requirements will need separate containers.

Buyer's rights

Upon receiving an order, the buyer will be able to check the integrity of the packaging and whether the contents match, and if a discrepancy is found, refuse the order through the courier; information about the refusal is automatically sent to the pharmacy. If defects are discovered after acceptance, the buyer will be able to send a request to the platform operator indicating the name and batch of the product, the digital marking code, and a description of the problems — the platform will pass the information on to the pharmacy. If the customer cannot be reached, the order can be collected from the same pharmacy within three days.

Status and context

The discussion of the document on the portal will last until November 19, meaning no decisions have been made yet — this is a draft that may be changed. Earlier, Spot.uz wrote about another document in the field of medicines supply: the president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, ordered that from 2027 the list of free medicines in the 'guaranteed package' be expanded to 73 medicines. These two initiatives concern different aspects of the circulation of medicines and are not directly related to each other.