The "McAuto" pharmacy concept, which hasn't found success in Europe, is a huge hit in the United States

Saturday, Aug 23, 2025

El Confidencial

Drive-thru services exist globally, but pharmacy implementation faces professional concerns regarding personalized patient care.

🔗 Read the article on elconfidencial.com

[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

Drive-thru services, which originated around 1940 in the United States for leisure and hospitality sectors, are now available at various US businesses like banks, restaurants, supermarkets, and pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens, with similar availability in countries like Canada and Australia. In Europe, this service is limited; while some Spanish pharmacies have adopted it, official bodies emphasize that dispensing medication requires a professional, personalized consultation to ensure correct use and patient safety. These pharmaceutical services involve detailed interactions to gather clinical information, which helps reduce medication-related problems and improve adherence. Other European countries also see the emergence of drive-thru pharmacies, with Austria having few but growing numbers, Croatia pioneering the service for accessibility, and the Czech Republic having one such pharmacy.

🔗 Read the original article

Previous page FEATURE: "I'm looking for young people, but I can't find them." Coastal resorts, stuck in the past and undergoing "rehabilitation."
Next page "We sometimes have to postpone surgeries due to a lack of blood." This is a problem that Romania has yet to resolve, even with..

© 2026 Pulse - Europe beyond the beat


PULSE is an initiative for cross-border collaborative journalism in Europe co-funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement n. PO 4500158093.

PULSE is an initiative coordinated by OBCT that has been promoting intensive journalistic cross-border collaborations in Europe since 2024. Its main aim is to help strengthen the European public sphere by reporting on and telling stories from new and diverse perspectives.

At the heart of PULSE are 10 leading national news outlets (Delfi – Lithuania, Deník Referendum – Czechia, Der Standard – Austria, EfSyn – Greece, El Confidencial – Spain, Gazeta Wyborcza – Poland, HotNews – Romania, HVG – Hungary, Il Sole 24 Ore – Italy, Mediapool – Bulgaria) and three transnational organisations, including OBCT , n-ost and Voxeurop .

Additional outlets and journalists are involved as associate partners, including EUobserver , Føljeton (Denmark), H-Alter (Croatia), Levila (Estonia), Rubryka (Ukraine), and The Journal Investigates (Ireland).

PULSE is driven by a sort of virtual transnational newsroom made up of journalists from all the publications involved. It collaboratively produces new journalistic content on European issues on a daily basis, coming in many different languages. The editorial output amounts to over a thousand publications per year, mostly in article form.

PULSE also runs 4 thematic networks open to any European journalist interested in crucial issues such as EU enlargement, relations between the EU and other global powers, the EU’s green transition, or media and the information society. These networks function as online communities and periodically publish calls for pitches.