“Community pharmacy reimbursement arrangements do not aim to ensure that every pharmacy is paid as much or more than it paid for every product,” pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock yesterday (October 21) told MPs.
The comment came after Conservative MP for South West Devon Rebecca Smith asked “how many and what proportion of community pharmacies have dispensed medications at a loss in each of the last three years”.
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Kinnock said that the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) does not hold that information but that drug reimbursement “aims overall to reimburse as much as they were bought for, plus the allowed medicine margin”.
He added that as part of the last pharmacy contract, “pharmacies were allowed to retain £850 million from the medicine margin, on top of what they are paid for the medicines they purchase as part of providing NHS services”.
Losing “£1 a pill”
Meanwhile, the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) last week revealed the extent to which “government funding falls way short of the price local pharmacies have to pay for many common medicines”.
In a “snapshot” analysis of the difference between wholesale medicine costs from “two major wholesalers” and NHS funding rates in the September price concession list, it found that pharmacies dispensing Amantadine are being underpaid by more than £75 a pack.
Pharmacies are losing £75.99 per pack, which is “the equivalent of more than £1 per tablet”, it said.
Read more: ‘Unacceptable’ lack of April concessions ‘likely’ due to DH changes
And in April, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) blamed the government’s “untested” changes to the drug tariff that month for a lack of price concessions, which left pharmacists wondering whether the government expects “contractors to make a loss”.
These changes were “imposed by the government without [the negotiator’s] agreement” and were opposed by CPE “in the strongest terms”, it said at the time.