Buyer's Guides
Choosing between 30ml and 1 litre is not just about volume. Neck size, closure compatibility and how much headspace you leave all change what you should reach for.
OMS Clinical Team
Product Specialists
Most UK dispensing bottles come in 30ml, 60ml, 100ml, 125ml, 150ml, 200ml, 250ml, 300ml, 500ml and 1 litre. Pick the smallest size that holds the quantity with a little headspace. Over-sizing wastes money, takes shelf space and makes a part-filled bottle look short-measured to the patient.
In practice a community pharmacy turns over four or five sizes. Liquid antibiotics for children tend to land in 100ml and 200ml. Adult liquids sit at 200ml to 500ml. The 30ml and 60ml sizes are mostly ear, eye and nasal preparations, or specials made in small quantities. The 1 litre is a bulk container rather than something handed to a patient.
Ordering the whole range in small quantities is a common mistake. You end up with dead stock in four sizes and run out of the two you use daily. Look at what you dispensed last quarter and weight your order to that.
A bottle filled to the brim cannot be shaken, and most liquid medicines need shaking before a dose. Leave roughly ten percent of the volume as headspace. That means a 150ml quantity is better in a 200ml bottle than squeezed into a 150ml one.
BS1679 is the British Standard for containers for pharmaceutical dispensing. It sets out requirements for the container itself, including dimensional tolerances and the light transmission properties that make amber glass suitable for light-sensitive preparations. When a supplier says a bottle is to BS1679, that is what they are claiming.
It is worth knowing that the standard covers the container, not what you put in it. Suitability for a particular preparation is still your professional judgement.
Take your dispensing data for the last three months, group by the volume actually supplied, and round each group up to the next available bottle size. That gives you a weighting rather than a guess. Most pharmacies find two sizes account for well over half their usage, and ordering those in bulk while keeping small quantities of the rest is cheaper than an even spread.
If you are ordering for a dispensing practice rather than a community pharmacy, the mix shifts. Practices tend to use fewer sizes and larger quantities of each.
None of these are catastrophic on their own. Together they are why a lot of dispensaries carry more container stock than they need and still run short of the size they use most.
