The Prescription Pricing Authority is incorrectly deducting prescription charges from pharmacy remuneration for no-charge items, two local pharmaceutical committee secretaries have alleged.
In a letter to The Journal on May 30, Mr Michael Williams (secretary, Solihull LPC) and Mr John Gentle (secretary, Shropshire LPC) said that PPA staff were ignoring information provided by contractors on FP34C forms when they sent prescriptions for pricing. The forms included a box in which contractors recorded the number of no-charge items, such as contraceptives and other items listed in Part XVI (section 10) of the Drug Tariff that were included on prescription forms with chargeable items.
They said that pricing staff were failing to deduct this number of items from the total number of items in the charge paid bundle in order to arrive at the number of charges to be deducted from reimbursement totals. This meant that reimbursement was being reduced by more prescription charges than had been collected.
"On querying this matter with the PPA, it is clear that they do not interpret the Form FP34C in the same way contractors do," the two LPC secretaries wrote. "A member of staff at one bureau has told one LPC secretary that contractors are filling in the forms incorrectly, while another stated that he had never noticed the no-charge-applicable box before. When the matter has been raised with the contractor payments division at Newcastle, they have stated that it has nothing to do with them."
The worst case which has come to light is of a contractor who dispenses methadone instalment prescriptions for drug addicts. This contractor lost the equivalent of 95 prescription charges in a single month.
Suggesting that now might be the time to revitalise a motion of no confidence in the PPA which had been tabled at this year's LPC representatives' conference, but was withdrawn for fear of alienating PPA staff (PJ, March 25, 484), Mr Williams and Mr Gentle said: "While one can sympathise with the pressures endured by staff at pricing bureaux at the moment, and can understand why the proposer of the motion at the LPC conference eventually withdrew it, the staff themselves do nothing to help their cause by failing to address genuine concerns raised by contractors, and by failing to raise these concerns with their superiors."
No-one from the PPA was available to comment as The Journal went to press.