Government must pay compensation after pharmacy IT ‘shambles’
Ministers “bear ultimate responsibility” for payment tech issues that have left Scottish pharmacies “tens of thousands of pounds” out of pocket, the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) has announced.
“Health secretary Neil Gray should intervene to compensate pharmacies left in financial chaos because of flaws in Scotland’s new pharmacy payment system,” the NPA has said.
The membership body today (July 25) warned that “many pharmacies” have faced “repeated shortfalls in expected funding under the new system, which was introduced last year as a new way to process payments to pharmacies”.
Read more: ‘No straightforward solution’: GP tech issue causes pharmacy ‘confusion’
“Errors in the data capture validation and pricing process introduced by NHS National Services Scotland (NSS)” led "pharmacies [to] report shortfalls of tens of thousands of pounds” in "some cases", it said.
“On other occasions, NHS boards have clawed back money from pharmacies at short notice, following processing errors that had initially resulted in an overpayment,” the NPA added.
“Now a full year after the system was launched, pharmacies are still reporting significant problems and still have no notice nor clarity of what they are getting paid,” it said.
"Just wrong"
NPA chief executive Paul Rees added that members had told the NPA that “they cannot plan, cannot settle their accounts and even face costly overdrafts or issues paying medicine suppliers because of issues with this troubled payment system”.
He said that “in the 21st century we should not be facing a computer shambles of this nature – it is just wrong that hard working community pharmacies should be facing financial stress because an IT system cannot get its sums right”.
Read more: Streeting thanks pharmacists who ‘soldiered on’ after IT outages
“We believe ministers bear ultimate responsibility for this, so they should intervene to make sure the system is fit for purpose - providing timely and accurate information and paying pharmacies the money they are owed - and also compensating those who have lost out,” he added.
C+D approached NSS and the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) for comment.
New system came “with challenges”
NSS has previously been tight-lipped about the scale of problems caused by the new payment system that came into force last July.
Following C+D questioning in May, it admitted that a number of known issues with the new system were being progressed.
But it said it these weren’t specific problems.
At the time, NSS associate director Martin Morrison told C+D that “the introduction of any new national IT infrastructure comes with challenges”.
Read more: ‘We’re bracing ourselves’: Pharmacies ‘still’ backlogged after IT failure
Morrison added that “as of February 2024, the new system [was] making payments based on actual dispensed items” instead of making estimates, which had previously resulted in overpayments and clawbacks.
“Those overpayments have since been recovered by March 2024 and a further reconciliation statement was sent to contractors in early May 2024,” he said at the time.
He added that NSS “fully recognised and apologised for the duration and impact of issues experienced”.
NSS “continues to remedy issues”
Now, NSS has told C+D that it "[continues] to remedy any remaining payment issues promptly.”
It added that it “remains committed to working closely with community pharmacies, NHS boards, Community Pharmacy Scotland (CPS) and other stakeholders to ensure accurate payments and clear communications are provided".
"We acknowledge the challenges faced by pharmacy contractors since July 2023 during the introduction of a new national IT system for over 1,200 community pharmacies in Scotland,” it said.
Read more: GPs switch off update patient record function in new Pharmacy First IT twist
Meanwhile, the DH added that it was “aware that following the introduction” of the new system “by NSS there were issues regarding payments being made to community pharmacy contractors”.
“The Scottish government has been assured by NSS that any incorrect payments have been, or are being, rectified,” it said.
DH officials, “NSS and CPS are engaging with all relevant stakeholders, including the NPA, as we continue to monitor the situation,” it added.
IT chaos
Earlier this month, Community Pharmacy Scotland (CPS) warned that there was “no straightforward solution” to an issue with “a particular version of the ‘Vision’ GP prescribing system”.
It said that the system error could “cause confusion” for pharmacies and added that it had “no timescale” for a fix.
Read more: Pharmacies face return of paper prescriptions amid 'global IT outages'
Meanwhile this week, the NPA warned that pharmacies across the UK were “still working though backlogs” caused by the global IT outages that caused havoc last week.
“We’re bracing ourselves for the next couple of days to be very busy because we are going to have to play catchup,” Newdays Pharmacy group owner Olivier Picard told C+D at the time.
