The Prescription Pricing Authority is considering setting aside completely the backlog of unprocessed prescriptions for Category D items as a possible way of getting up to date with prescription pricing.
In written evidence to the House of Commons Health Select Committee's generics inquiry (PJ, November 13, p773) the PPA's chief executive (Mr Nick Scholte) said that prescription processing was falling two weeks behind every month. As a result, discussions had been started with Department of Health officials on whether the backlog should be set aside so that the PPA could make a fresh start. Mr Scholte pointed out that this would not solve the problem as it would still take six weeks to process each months prescriptions until new staff were trained. A 10 per cent increase in processing staff was planned.
If the backlog were to be set aside, Mr Scholte went on, there would then be three alternative approaches to dealing with it. The first, which Mr Scholte did not believe would be acceptable to pharmacy contractors, would be not to process them at all and to rely on estimated payments. The second was to process them whenever time allowed, which would a very slow process and the third would be to process a statistically valid sample to allow adjustments to the estimated payments that were currently being made.
Mr Godfrey Horridge (financial executive, Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee) told The Journal on November 16 that setting aside the backlog and not processing it at all would be totally unacceptable.
"I cannot believe that the PPA has made such a proposal. It certainly has not been mentioned to us."