[Legal and regulatory aspects of physicians' prescriptions]

The prescribing authority is one of the powers granted solely to physicians, as part of their professional definition in the Israeli law. Prescribing is one of the most common activities in the daily work of the physician. It is estimated that on average every physician in Israel writes more than a thousand prescriptions annually. In this situation, where prescribing is a formal-legal activity, one expects that this issue should be defined clearly by law. However, a review of the relevant Israeli laws and regulations reveals that many questions regarding prescribing and prescriptions are not dealt with by the law, and that most physicians are not familiar with it. Therefore, the objective of this article is to highlight the legal issues arising from the legislation regarding prescribing versus the prevailing practices of physicians. Since this issue is very complex, we divided the article into two parts the first part deals with legal and regulatory aspects of prescribing, while the second part deals with unique prescriptions, including financial aspects of hospitals and Sick Funds prescriptions, narcotic prescriptions and prescriptions for non-approved drugs.