The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7232 p79
18 January 2003

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Letters to the Editor

Period-of-treatment fee

PSNC should seek judicial review

From Mr J. M. Goldie, FRPharmS

The season of goodwill and pantomime was upon us as the "Broker's men" in the form of the Government once again released bad news when practitioners had other matters upon which to concentrate.

I refer to the news that community pharmacists will no longer be paid the "Fee related to threshold quantities" (PJ, 14 December 2002, p835). It was item H under "Professional fees" in the December 2002 Drug Tariff but is omitted from the January 2003 edition — another surreptitious attack on our remuneration.

In conversation with a Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee member who agreed with my disgust at the underhand manner of its introduction and the fact that pharmacy was again the butt of Government's parsimony, I was asked what could the PSNC do?

It was only subsequently that I realised what the PSNC could do — they could seek a judicial review of the Department of Health's action. When the cost plus contract was unilaterally ended by the Government, the PSNC failed initially to take any action; eventually it sought a judicial review only to be told that had it objected at once it may well have succeeded but by delaying it had accepted the state of affairs.

If contractors feel sufficiently strongly, they should write to the PSNC along these lines expressing their views and asking that action be taken while they are still in business to benefit from a victory.

(If there is a good reason why this payment is discontinued contractors should be told: come on PSNC, or perhaps the Department, why has this payment been ended, where has the money gone? The profession is hanging on your every word.)

If pharmacy contractors are prepared to suffer in silence and not to object to these repeated attacks on their income then they will have only themselves to blame for the eventual demise of their business. Make a fight of it, if you are going to be sunk then go down with the band playing and the guns blazing; do not fade out in a whimper. It is your business and your future as well as the future of community pharmacy.

J. Malcolm Goldie
Newcastle upon Tyne

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