There was one thing that one of my pre-reg tutors was frequently wound up about - issues about prescription charges. Refunds, disputes about whether those tablets were one charge or three, whether certificate X led to charge exemptions and the other areas that occupy the time that community pharmacists could be spending on pharmaceutical care. He didn't become a pharmacist, he would remind us, to become a tax-collector.
Today there has been an announcement that top-up charges will be allowed on the NHS in England.
Now,as is frequently the case, the devil will be in the detail of what will actually be allowed. But I would hate to see this resulting in some of the clinical pharmacists' time taken up by financially-driven bureaucrazy, such as which patients have paid an extra £20 for ondansetron rather than cyclizine first-line, should they feel nausea on morphine treatment.
(That's £10 for the cost of the drug and £10 in the back pocket of the hospital to make up for the imminent spending cuts).
Already I know a pharmacist who's investing a lot of her time in ensuring that the PCTs will pay for immunoglobulin before it's administered to the patient. She's spent a fair bit on other borderline drugs, where it's the NHS that's paying; and now potentially patients could commission drugs as well.
I don't want anyone to be denied treatment because they can't afford it. The heart-breaking cases we've seen paraded over recent months where patients could afford the drugs, but not the loss of NHS healthcare that goes with it, could soon be replaced by heart-breaking cases of the next patients below, who can't afford the drug top-up charges.
