Polish duty pharmacies — night, weekend, holiday | mojApteczka

Sunday, 3 a.m. The child started running a fever, the paracetamol ran out on Friday. The nearest 24-hour pharmacy is 60 km away. But in your county there is a duty pharmacy on duty for tonight — only you have no idea which one and when it was scheduled.

Since version 1.8.2 mojApteczka surfaces duty pharmacies — pharmacies designated under article 94 of the Polish Pharmaceutical Law to a rotating night, weekend, or holiday duty. We pull the data straight from county BIP portals — each county publishes its own roster, and mojApteczka consolidates them into a single view next to the pharmacy map.

What is a duty pharmacy

Duty pharmacy ≠ 24-hour pharmacy. The difference:

• 24-hour pharmacy (całodobowa) — a pharmacy that permanently operates 24/7. There are a few hundred in Poland, mostly in larger cities.
• Duty pharmacy (apteka dyżurna) — a pharmacy designated by the county council for a specific night, weekend, or public holiday as part of a rotation required by law. It can be any pharmacy in the county — the assignment is rotating and applies only during the designated hours (typically 22:00-8:00, or 7:30-23:00 on public holidays).

Duty pharmacies exist so that in every Polish county, at any time (especially at night, on weekends, and on holidays) at least one pharmacy is available. Small towns where nobody runs a 24-hour pharmacy rely entirely on the article-94 rotation.

Where the data comes from

Duty rosters are not published in the central dane.gov.pl registry — each county announces its schedule on its own BIP portal. That means a typical user looking for a duty pharmacy at 3 a.m. has to:

1. figure out which county they are in,
2. find the local starostwo (county) BIP page,
3. dig out the duty calendar for the specific date,
4. check the hours and the pharmacy address.

mojApteczka does that for you. We scrape county BIPs every day (~314 counties in Poland), normalise dates, hours, and addresses, and surface the list of currently-on-duty pharmacies around your location.

How to find a duty pharmacy in mojApteczka

1. Open the Pharmacy map — duty pharmacies are part of the same screen,
2. Turn on the "Duty pharmacies" filter in the list header — you see only pharmacies on duty for the current date,
3. On each pharmacy card you see a "Nearest duties" section listing the date, duty type (night/weekend/holiday), and the applicable hours,
4. Duty pharmacies get a purple "Duty" badge on the card and a purple map pin,
5. The "Open today" filter since 1.8.2 also picks up pharmacies on a night duty — if a duty opens at 23:00, the pharmacy appears under "Open today" despite formally being closed at standard hours.

What you see on a duty-pharmacy card

• Purple "Duty" badge — instantly tells you this is not the regular schedule,
• Duty type — night, weekend, holiday, or a "combo" when a holiday falls on a Sunday,
• Concrete hours of the duty for this date (e.g. 22:00-8:00),
• Standard fields: address, phone, distance, and the regular hours for comparison.

Tap-through to navigation works the same as for an ordinary pharmacy — Apple Maps / Google Maps with the pharmacy set as destination.

Geographic coverage

Duty-pharmacy data depends on whether the county currently publishes its schedule on the BIP and whether the publication is correctly formatted (sometimes counties publish PDFs of scans, sometimes HTML, sometimes JSON). Coverage is not 100% and varies by county — in particular smaller towns sometimes lag behind or publish incomplete rosters.

In such cases the card shows "No duty data for this county — check the starostwo BIP or call the nearest pharmacy" with a direct link to the county website.

Search radius up to 100 km

Version 1.8.2 raised the maximum search radius on the pharmacy map from 25 km to 100 km (steps: 2/5/10/25/50/75/100 km). For villages and smaller towns that means actual access to a duty pharmacy — the previous 25 km did not always reach a duty pharmacy in a neighbouring county.

How it connects with other features

Duty pharmacies sit on top of the pharmacy map:

• Pharmacy map — same screen, same interface, same map,
• Pharmacy opening hours — regular pharmacy hours (from the Polish pharmacy registry / ZSMOPL), independent of the duty rotation,
• UK & Ireland pharmacies — the analogue for UK and Irish pharmacies (the system works differently there; no Polish-style "duty pharmacy"),
• Duplicate detection — if you buy at a duty pharmacy a medicine you already have at home, the system catches it.

Availability

Duty pharmacies are available in the mojApteczka iOS and Android apps (from version 1.8.2, May 2026). The web version also shows duty badges next to pharmacies. Coverage depends on how the county publishes its roster.

Note: article-94 duty rosters are decisions of the county council, published on the BIP. They can change (e.g. after an extraordinary decision by the starostwo). mojApteczka refreshes the data once a day — if you see a pharmacy on duty in the evening, call before driving over to confirm; the phone number is on every card. In a life-threatening emergency call 112 or 999 — a pharmacy is not an emergency response unit.

Duty pharmacies turn "I have to find a duty pharmacy at 3 a.m. on a starostwo BIP portal" into "I turn on the Duty filter in mojApteczka, see the nearest pharmacy with its duty hours, and tap once to navigate." Coverage depends on county BIP publishing, but for most counties the data is current and complete.