Medicines Management
Issue no 3, p1-4
May/June 2002

This article
Reprint
Photocopy

News summary

Pharmacist calls for national fees for medicines management

A primary care pharmacist has called for a nationally negotiated set scale of fees for medicines management services to be introduced.

Marion Bradley, primary care pharmacist, Walsall PCT, says that the current system must change if medincines management is to be successful.

"Community pharmacy has been so locked into the contract, with doctors signing repeat prescriptions on bits of paper, that it has to change," she told Medicines Management.

But until there was a nationally negotiated contract for additional pharmacy services like medicines management interventions, Mrs Bradley said she feared change would be slow.

"We need to all be on an equal footing, rather than picking up payments for little projects where the funding is not necessarily recurrent. How can you progress once the money runs out?" she asked.

Mrs Bradley said that her local medicines management scheme paid pharmacists about £2 for each intervention they suggested, but that most of these interventions were computer inequivalence measures — such as prescriptions written for the wrong number of days — rather than clinical or quality measures. "There should be a nationally negotiated scale of fees for these services," she said.

But Dr Brian Curwain, chief pharmacist at New Forest PCT, disagreed. "The trouble with the idea of set fees for activities is that it would define the activities nationally in a way that would confine local developments and the mixture of services being provided," he said.

Dr Curwain added that he believed that although local pharmacists would welcome set national fees, because they would know what they could charge, organisations like PCTs could feel constricted. "They would feel hidebound to pay them," he said.

Dr Curwain added that local pharmaceutical Services pilots were intended to address pharmacists' concerns about potential loss of income if they reduced the number of prescriptions they dispensed through more effective medicines management.

But he warned: "If LPS doesn't take off then the changes [to pharmacists' remuneration] will happen through the renegotiated national contract anyway."