The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7489 p178
16 February 2008

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• Drug addiction (3)
• Controlled drugs
• NHS
• EHC
• Statins
• Community pharmacy (3)
• The Society (3)

Letters to the Editor

National Health Service (NHS)

Patients should contribute towards their care

From Mr P. V. Bremner, MRPharmS

It really winds me up every time I read a headline about the struggling NHS budget, or the cost to the NHS of medicines wastage, or implementing a minor ailment scheme so GP surgeries are not booked solid with tickly coughs (PJ, 2 February 2008, p111). We already offer an efficient and professional minor ailments scheme, and it is self-funding.

A patient enters a pharmacy with a minor ailment, is assessed by the pharmacist or other trained staff, and given advice about his or her condition. Sometimes a product might even be recommended which the patient can purchase over the counter. Simple.

I believe strongly that this concept should be applied across the NHS sector. Make patients pay a contribution towards their healthcare, and they will begin to value the service they are currently taking for granted. In my pharmacy today, I had to dump £220 worth of beclometasone inhalers returned from one patient, none of them used.

By my estimate, the patient had been reordering the inhalers monthly for over two years, without ever using them. Surely, if that patient had had to pay a nominal fee, say, 50p per item per month, then he or she would have thought twice about reordering an expensive medicine that would not be used.

Including the medicine cost on dispensing labels would easily demonstrate to patients the value for money they are getting.

Likewise, a nominal fee for a GP visit, say £3, would make a patient think twice about booking an appointment for a tickly cough, when a bottle of cough medicine might only set them back half that amount.

Peter Bremner
Buxton, Derbyshire

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