Steps to be taken to overcome a six-month prescription pricing backlog in Wales may be about to be agreed between the Welsh Central Pharmaceutical Committee and representatives of the Welsh National Assembly.
A meeting between the two took place on April 6. Mr Philip Parry (chairman, WCPC) told The Journal on April 10 that he was waiting for proposals from the National Assembly as a result of the meeting. Whatever was proposed would be considered by the committee on April 19.
Papers considered by the assembly's Health and Social Services Committee on March 22 proposed that the backlog should be dealt with by basing reimbursement on a sample of prescriptions dispensed. The aim would be to keep errors within the 1 per cent limit that was achieved when every prescription was priced individually. If nothing was done, the committee was told, the pricing backlog would have increased to a year by February, 2001.
The report to the assembly committee said that all independent pharmacies would have their prescriptions priced in full. Multiple pharmacies would have only a percentage of prescriptions plus all high cost prescription items (£50 and over) priced in full. This would reduce the pricing workload by 33 per cent. The percentage of prescriptions to be priced for multiples ranges from one in 10 for Boots, which dispenses 415,000 items a month in Wales, to five in 10 for Tesco, which dispenses 58,000 items a month. Between them, the multiples in Wales dispense 1.569m items a month, while independents dispense 1.858m items.
A further proposal is that pharmacy computer software should be modified so that pharmacies endorse prescriptions with pricing codes themselves.
The pricing backlog has built up to six months in Wales as a result of the large numbers of products moving in and out of Drug Tariff Category D over the past year and operational difficulties at the pricing office run by Bro Taf health authority. As well as having to look up details of prescribed items manually in order to enter pricing codes into their computers, pricing clerks had to deal with the introduction of new equipment to resolve potential Y2K problems and endure two office moves to make space for the National Assembly in what was their office building.