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The registers, and how to check a list yourself

Why this surface has no addresses, which register is authoritative for what, how amenity=pharmacy and opening_hours work in OpenStreetMap, and the licence terms that come with the data.

This describes how pharmacy systems work; it is not medical advice, not a diagnosis and not a directory. It carries no pharmacy names, addresses, telephone numbers, opening times or prices, because those go out of date faster than a page can be republished — confirm anything time-sensitive with the pharmacy itself. Nothing here is a reason to start, stop or change a medicine: that belongs to your prescriber, and the pharmacist at the counter is the fastest professional to ask in the meantime.

Why there are no addresses on this surface

A pharmacy directory is a data-freshness problem wearing a content problem's clothes. Locations are stable, names change slowly, and hours change several times a year — seasonally, at Christmas, when staffing changes, when the building around the pharmacy changes its own hours. A published list of hours is therefore wrong somewhere on the day it is published and wronger every week afterwards, and the specific harm is not abstract: it is a person driving across a city at eleven at night to a dark window. What is stable enough to write down is the system — the regulator, the register, the prescription mechanism, the reimbursement rule and the local vocabulary. That is what this surface contains.

Which register answers which question

Every country here has a medicines agency that licenses pharmacies and publishes a register of them: Ravimiamet in Estonia, Fimea in Finland, the State Agency of Medicines in Latvia, the State Medicines Control Agency in Lithuania, Läkemedelsverket in Sweden, the Norwegian medical products authority, and Lægemiddelstyrelsen in Denmark. That register answers one question authoritatively — is this a licensed pharmacy — and no others. It is not a source of opening hours anywhere in this region. Separately, most of the same agencies publish a register of authorised medicines, which answers a different question and carries the official package leaflet; people looking for one routinely land in the other. The Estonian page spells out that distinction, and it holds everywhere.

OpenStreetMap: what it is good for

In OpenStreetMap a pharmacy is tagged amenity=pharmacy, usually with dispensing=yes where it fills prescriptions, a name, and often opening_hours. Coverage of locations in the Nordic and Baltic cities is genuinely good, and for "where are the pharmacies near this point" it is the best free dataset there is. Coverage of hours is a different matter: an opening_hours value is only as fresh as the last mapper who checked it, it carries no timestamp a user sees, and it is silently absent far more often than it is wrong. Use OSM to enumerate candidates and the pharmacy's own channel to confirm one — that division of labour is the whole method.

Querying it, and the licence you are agreeing to

The practical tool for extracting a set of pharmacies is Overpass, which queries the OSM database directly; a query for amenity=pharmacy inside a bounding box or an administrative area returns the nodes and ways with their tags in a few seconds. What comes back is licensed under the Open Database License. That licence has two obligations people forget: attribution — you must credit OpenStreetMap contributors — and share-alike, which applies when you publish a derived database. Using the data to answer a question is unproblematic; republishing an enriched copy of it is a licensing decision, not a technical one. The licence text is short and worth reading once.

Reading and writing opening_hours

The syntax is compact and covers far more than any pharmacy needs. The subset that covers nearly everything real: weekday selectors (Mo-Fr, Sa,Su), time ranges (09:00-19:00), several ranges separated by commas, off for closed, 24/7 for round the clock, and PH for public holidays. Rules are separated by semicolons and a later rule overrides an earlier one for the days it names. A range whose end is earlier than its start crosses midnight. Beyond that the grammar has month and week selectors, ordinal weekdays, sunrise and sunset and fallback rules, and any parser should say clearly when it has met something it cannot read rather than guessing. The checker on the open-now page does exactly that.

Chains, rotas and terms of use

The most current duty information in most of these countries sits on a pharmacy chain's own site or a pharmacy association's search. Those are the right things to link to and the wrong things to copy: whether you may extract and republish them is a question about their terms of use and about database rights, not about whether a scraper works. The defensible pattern is the one this surface uses — describe the system, name the publisher, link to the source, and let the visitor land on the page that is maintained by the people who know. If you are building something for a municipality or a health service, ask the publisher; in this field they are usually glad to be asked.

The opening_hours reader

The last row is the point of the table. A reader that cannot parse a construct should say so by name rather than guess, because a parser that silently drops a seasonal rule reports a pharmacy as open on the one day of the year the rule exists to describe.

Sources: OpenStreetMap · OpenStreetMap wiki — amenity=pharmacy · OpenStreetMap wiki — the opening_hours syntax · Open Database License 1.0 · Overpass Turbo — querying OpenStreetMap · checked 2026-09-08

Frequently asked questions

The other rules

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