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Introduction: Pharmaceutical care services are crucial to guarantee safe and effective medication use through utilization of pharmacists’ knowledge about drugs. Regulations set the conditions and platforms that these services are provided through. Hence, regulatory changesdirectly affect the shape of the whole pharmacy practices.

Objectives: to study how current regulations and recent regulatory changes in Sweden affect pharmaceutical care provision, particularly,counseling in community pharmacies.

Methods: Scoping literature review was conducted, articles were searched through PubMed database and through reviewing the references of the selected articles, and interpretative analysis was carried out.

Results: the development of pharmaceutical sector after re-regulation of community pharmacies (liberalization) seem to be more businessoriented and market responsive rather than focusing on pharmaceutical care and Regulations and regulatory changes, generally, do not seem to support sufficiently or advance pharmaceutical care and patient counseling.

Discussion: Imbalance between stakeholders resulted in domination of politicians view and marginal role for professional organizations. Market mechanisms and consumer empowerment could interfere with proper healthcare provision, and its effects on the pharmacy sector should be studied further. However, opportunities for advancement still exist to build on such as robust drug related problems (DRP) systems for collection, analysis and classification, and some efforts to set practice standards. Some solutions could build on this such as parallel standardization efforts by pharmacists and developing stronger feedback and rewarding mechanisms.