The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7341 p335
19 March 2005

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· Public liability insurance
· Community pharmacy
· New contract
· Council election
· Prescription charges
· Repeat dispensing
· ETP
· Complementary medicine
· The Society (4)
· The Journal (2)

Letters to the Editor

Prescription charges

Abolition and ETP roll out

From Mr N. Baumber, FRPharmS

I was pleased to see in Clare Bellingham’s article on the prescription charge debate (PJ, 12 March, p293) some support for abolition offered by mainstream politicians, namely Colin Fox, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, and Jane Hutt, a health minister in the Welsh Assembly. Let us hope that our English Members of Parliament will take up the challenge before too long since they seem to have missed the political potential for abolition at the next general election.

If everything goes to schedule then the Government’s plan is for 50 per cent of prescriptions to be transferred electronically by the end of 2005 and 100 per cent by the end of 2007 (except for a few nursing, dental and hospital prescriptions). The confusing time will come when the prescription as we know it is being produced as a “token” for the patient. At the moment the FP10 is the official bearer of the patient’s signature certifying payment or claiming exemption. What happens to such important certification in the brave new paperless society?

It seems to me that the best time to effect the abolition of prescription charges is when ETP is ready for introduction later this year. We could save a lot of additional stress and filing space at the time when the new system is bound to be slowing dispensing down with its teething problems.

Noel Baumber
Grantham, Lincolnshire

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