Group items tagged

The new Flat Fee payment to roll out in April 2023 to all pharmacy contractors who dispense at least 101 items a month, up to a national total of £70m on an annual basis. "The value of the Flat Fee payment has now been determined at £533 per month and will be introduced in the April 2023 Drug Tariff," said the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC). "As with all payments, the Flat Fee payments are subject to change throughout the year depending on the overall level of funding delivery to Community Pharmacies. This will be carefully monitored by PSNC and DHSC, and any funding changes will be communicated to pharmacy contractors as soon as they are known," said PSNC.

We know remuneration influences behaviour. If I have a construction company and I pay a bricklayer a fee per brick to supply and fit, I suspect he will source them from the cheapest supplier and lay as many bricks as he possibly can. If one day, I reduce the fee such that it barely covers the cost of the brick, at a time when bricks are in short supply and labour costs have gone up, oh and I take some money off him for the profit he made on bricks he supplied the previous year, I suspect he will tell me to stick my job where the sun doesn't shine. It may be a crude analogy, but it is pretty much what's happened in community pharmacy over the last 20 years. The remuneration we get for dispensing does not cover the cost of providing the service. The reimbursement for the drugs does not cover the cost of the drugs. In fact, we make a loss on many items given all the clawbacks and supply shortages. Wages have gone up. And then each year the government claws back profit they say we've made, apparently! Yet, despite all this, we continue providing the service under this archaic system, allowing our paymaster to repeat the injustice because they know they can and, unlike the bricklayer, we will just suck it up and take it. So, what makes us carry on like this? Is it our conscience towards patient care? Is it that we don't know what else to do and the fear of the unknown? Or is it like the boiling frog story, where the temperature has increased gradually around us that we haven't noticed the government heat slowly killing community pharmacy. I suspect the answer is a mixture of all these factors. The pain is somewhat masked when we see fee paying services

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) has announced the margin delivery rates will increase from October as the agreed £100m write off is implemented. "The baseline margin allowance will remain £800m per year in 2022/23 and 2023/24," said PSNC. "Margin levels in the last two full years (2020/21 and 2021/22), as measured by the Margin Survey of independent pharmacies, were in excess of the baseline allowance, meaning that an excess was accrued." As new services have been introduced and take up of these has accelerated, the amount of unallocated funding left in the CPCF is now less than it previously was. As such, the value of the Transitional Payments will decrease from its current level. Some of the unallocated funding remaining in 2023/24 will be repurposed into a Flat Payment for all contractors (see details below). Over the course of the second half of 2022/23, the value of the Transitional Payments will be phased down. This will start in October 2022 with a reduction in payment levels to approximately 85% of the current level, as shown in the following table: