NPA wants contract exit payments to be held over for three years
Exit payments under the new pharmacy contract should be available after three years, and not in the first year, according to the National
Pharmaceutical Association.
As proposed, payments equivalent to the current annual professional allowance
will be available to the proprietors of pharmacies with low dispensing
volumes if they give up their NHS contracts before the end of March 2006.
But the NPA view, formed at its October board meeting, is that contractors
might want to try to build up their businesses under the new contract
or transfer to a local pharmaceutical services (LPS) contract before
giving up. So it has suggested that exit payments should only apply after
three years of the new contract.
Board members are also concerned that some pharmacies will be seriously
disadvantaged when electronic transfer of prescriptions is introduced.
Their concern centres on proposals for the introduction of electronic
signatures and paper tokens that patients will present to pharmacies
so that they can download the relevant electronic prescription.
“It is essential that those pharmacies that do not have the necessary
equipment to receive electronic prescriptions are not disenfranchised
from dispensing them,” board members say. They want prescribers
to be encouraged to sign all prescriptions and paper tokens so that they
are legally valid in their own right.
“Patients are likely to assume that tokens are prescriptions and
will suffer a delay in receiving medicines if unsigned tokens are presented
at a pharmacy that is incapable of handling ETP,” they say. |
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