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Letters to the Editor
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NHS
Need for financial rigour
From Mr S. Curtis, MRPharmS
I read with interest your report from the British Pharmaceutical Conference
(PJ, 9 September, p309) where Andy Burnham comments, as Minister of State
for Delivery and Quality, that one of the key drivers in the NHS is the
need for financial
rigour in the system.
In another report on p301, the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee
points out that, having checked 2.75 million prescriptions (0.4 per cent
of the total dispensed), the National Prescription Research Centre discovered
that 1.04 per
cent had been priced incorrectly.
I do not know a correct figure for how many dispensing errors pharmacists
may make over any period, but I would be interested to find out for comparison
with how incorrectly we are being reimbursed by the NHS Business Services
Authority. The PSNC quotes an underpayment of 0.05 per cent. From the
data I can find (in the year to June 2006) on a total of 728 million
items dispensed at a net ingredient cost of £7,895m, this underpayment
equates to nearly £4m incorrectly taken away from contractors.
Given Mr Burnham’s job title is that of delivery and quality perhaps
he would care to comment on what seems to me to be an outrageously inept
government body; or perhaps someone from the NHS BSA could give an explanation
as to how it could allow an error rate of 1 in a 100 and how it intends
to improve in the future.
Steven Curtis
Stanmore,
Middlesex
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The NHS BUSINESS SERVICES AUTHORITY responds:
The
Prescription Pricing Division of the NHS BSA takes the accuracy of
prescription processing
very seriously. The PPD constantly measures the accuracy that it achieves
in the processing of nearly three million items per day. The results
from these accuracy measures are used in a continuing effort to improve
the
accuracy of the service.
In addition, the results are used to calculate a net cash variance
that estimates the underpayment that is made to dispensing contractors.
This value is used to
adjust discount rates in the annual review of the discount scale (Part V
of the Drug Tariff) so that dispensing contractors are compensated
for the underlying
error rate in prescription processing. |
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The
Pharmaceutical Journal