The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7174 710-713
17 November 2001

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  The industry
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Letters to the Editor

Prescription charge

How to avoid errors

From Mr J. A. McKerracher, MRPharmS

Recently I have been involved in the protracted process of trying to have prescriptions the Prescription Pricing Authority had switched from the exempt to the paid bundle, back to the exempt bundle, with repayment of all the £6.10 fees they had previously penalised us with.

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee agreed a new concession, whereby all prescriptions that indicate the age as under-16 or over-60 will not be switched to the paid bundle, even if the declaration on the reverse of the prescription is not completed. Until then, our health authority (HA) always used to send a photocopy of all switches back to us giving us the opportunity to confirm that the patient was indeed exempt and our HA trusted our input.

Since the new system was introduced the PPA does not automatically send the switched prescriptions back to our HA. We have to ask the HA to fax a letter to the prescription switching team asking for us to see them. The HA is then sent our complete monthly bundle back with the offending prescriptions placed on top. The HA then contacts us to invite us to confirm the patients are exempt. We then have to confirm the appeal in writing which the HA then sends back to the prescription switching team with the complete monthly bundle. Many pharmacists are probably aware of this procedure.

When I queried the switches from June this year the switching team discovered that one of the switches where they said the patient had written "as overleaf" was in fact the patient's usual signature which had been misread by the PPA. How many other prescriptions that were switched by the PPA because one or more of their operators misread the patient's signature should be reinvestigated for all contractors?

My suggestion is that the PPA and the PSNC should agree a system whereby all switched prescriptions (except those that have clearly had a charge levied), for whatever reason, should be sent back to the contractor for clarification. The £6.10 penalty should not be levied on the prescriptions returned for clarification until they are sent back and the contractor agrees there should have been a charge — with a time limit of one month to get them back to the PPA or the £6.10 penalty would be levied regardless.

John McKerracher
Lincoln

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