The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 272 No 7289 p268
6 March 2004

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£2m subsidy for the NHS

Community pharmacies in England and Wales will have given the NHS a £1.89m subsidy this financial year by failing to ensure that prescription charge exemption claims are properly completed. Local pharmaceutical committee representatives made an unanimous call, at their conference on 1 March in London, for the Prescription Pricing Authority to return to pharmacies for clarification all prescriptions that are deemed to be charge-paid prescriptions when they were submitted as exempt prescriptions.

Lindsay McClure, head of information services at the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee, said that 78 per cent of prescriptions that the PPA switched from exempt bundles to charge paid bundles were genuine mis-sorts. But the remainder, 0.22 per cent of all prescriptions, represented a loss to contractors. Each pharmacy lost an average of 2.5 prescription charges every month through incomplete exemption claims.

Alison Kidner, Wiltshire LPC, said that there was no reason why switched prescriptions could not be returned to pharmacies for correction and resubmission in the same way as prescriptions with endorsing errors.