Continuing incorrect prescription payments to pharmacies cast “serious doubts” on NHS paymasters’ accuracy, a buying group has said.
Feedback on payments by NHS Prescription Services (NHS PS, formerly Prescription Pricing Division) from Avicenna members unveiled underpayments of up to £2,300 in a single month.
NHS PS insisted it “consistently” paid contractors to 99.8 per cent accuracy, as agreed with the Department of Health. But in a statement Avicenna said: “Judging from our feedback, their accuracy falls significantly outside these parameters.”
One member was underpaid £5,720 over eight months when items were omitted from every payment during this period – up to 168 items in a monthly batch.
Another had 14 consecutive batches rechecked, revealing errors in every payment and a net underpayment of £7,270.
In yet another recheck, NHS PS reported a £174 underpayment, but a further check by PSNC revealed an additional shortfall of £422. On this latter case, NHS PS told C+D: “We are confident that checks are carried out to a high degree of accuracy.”
Avicenna was concerned that the “limited information” given to contractors made payments “impossible to reconcile”. NHS PS said it was “looking at the feasibility of providing more information to contractors”.
Avicenna recently met NHS PS to discuss its findings but had decided to make them public because the buying group was “not satisfied” with the response it got, Mr Jetha told C+D. “I’m not interested in how they do it,” he said. “We want to be accurately paid – how they do it is up to them.”
PSNC had identified “some improvement” in NHS PS’s automated prescription pricing system (CIP), said head of information services Lindsay McClure. But there remained “unresolved issues leading to errors”, which PSNC was “closely monitoring”.
