The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7495 p358
29 March 2008

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Supply of invoice information to become statutory in April

Voluntary invoice inquiries — used to find out how much community pharmacies in England pay for medicines so that reimbursement prices can be fixed in the Drug Tariff — are to be made statutory again. From 21 April, pharmacies will be obliged to supply any information requested, such as invoices, to the Secretary of State for Health or his nominee within 30 days.

Currently, the Department of Health sends a list of pharmacies to the Pharma- ceutical Services Negotiating Committee, which then collects invoices from them on a voluntary basis and analyses the data for the DoH. Although the PSNC has always encouraged pharmacies to supply invoice information there has been no obligation to do so.

Steve Lutener, head of regulation at the PSNC, said: “These are enabling Regulations. The voluntary scheme at present works well and there is nothing to prevent a voluntary scheme.”

However, he explained that statutory underpinning for the voluntary scheme had been included in the NHS (Pharmaceutical Services) Regulations 2005 and in the 1992 Regulations that applied before them. The clause had been left out when amendments were made to the Regulations in 2007 and this change reinstates it.