To ask the Secretary of State for Health what plans he has to permit pharmacists to supply prescriptions in quantities of 28 pills when 30 have been prescribed. [115691]
We have made clear we will look at allowing the rounding of prescriptions for 28 or 30 doses and multiples thereof, to increase the number of prescriptions which can be dispensed in whole patient packs. We will discuss this with the pharmaceutical services negotiating committee in the context of our overall desire to simplify the rules governing their reimbursement for medicines supplied on the national health service.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what estimate he has made of the cost to the NHS of the disposal of broken patient packs by pharmacists in each of the last three years. [115694]
Information is available only about the total cost of broken bulk payments. These are payments made to pharmacies for medicines which remain unused six months after the pharmacy has purchased the minimum quantity necessary to dispense a prescription. The available information is shown in the table.
| £ million | ||
| Resource figure | Cash figure | |
| 2002–03 | 5.4 | 5.3 |
| 2001–02 | 5.6 | 5.6 |
| 2000–01 | n/a | 5.9 |
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what assessment he has made of the potential of bar coding medicine packs for transfer to prescription forms. [115695]
The Prescription Pricing Authority operates high-speed machines to count and number prescription forms as they are received. This is necessary in order to calculate advance payments to community pharmacies and to ensure that any individual prescription form can be retrieved from storage if required, for example, for the purposes of investigating fraud. These machines could not operate if bar codes from medicine packs were transferred to prescription forms.