The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7186 p233-237
23 February 2002

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Department of Health (www.doh.gov.uk)

Pharmacies not to supply gluten-free foods on NHS

Plans to allow community pharmacies in England to make National Health Service supplies of gluten-free foods to coeliac patients on request have been dropped.

The scheme, proposed last October (PJ, 13 October, p498) was later put on hold (PJ, 8 December 2001, p805) because of worries over how the total cost of food supplied would be controlled. There were particular concerns that the money to pay for supplies would have come from general practitioners' prescribing budgets without them having any control over how much was spent.

Although the original proposal was intended to reduce GP paperwork, the Department of Health has now decided that the reduction would have been so small that the scheme was not justified. It also believed that a more tightly controlled scheme would have cost significantly more that the original proposal and would have placed a bureaucratic burden on coeliac patients.

The Department is now giving priority to introducing pharmacist-led repeat dispensing schemes, starting this year and going nation-wide by 2004, and introducing supplementary prescribing by pharmacists in 2003.

"These initiatives will have a much more significant effect on GP workload, and we are confident one or other or a combination of them should provide an answer to the gluten-free food issue," says the NHS chief executive's bulletin.