EXCLUSIVE

The annual cap on MURs should be lifted to benefit patients, Alliance Boots director of healthcare Richard Ashworth has said.

Boots pharmacists offered MURs to eligible patients even if they had already hit their paid annual target of 400 per pharmacy, but they would "ideally" prefer to be reimbursed for every one, Mr Ashworth told C+D in an exclusive interview yesterday (September 30).

The cap of 400 MURs was maintained in last week's funding settlement, and Mr Ashworth said he "understood the need for constraints". 

"I'm not as critical as many others have been. If we've already hit 400 and Mrs Jones needs it, we'll do it because our pharmacists know it's the right thing," he said.

However, he argued that the cap should be lifted "from a patient point of view" to ensure more people could potentially benefit from the service.

Mr Ashworth described the new funding agreement as "uneventful" and called for more services to be added to the 2015-16 settlement. Although reimbursement for dispensing prescriptions should be maintained, funding should be extended to cover "lower function" services that would allow pharmacy to reduce GPs' workloads, he said.

He pointed to vaccinations as an opportunity for "national commissioning" that would help pharmacists "take better care of patients". But Boots would not be able to offer new services in the future if it was not reimbursed for them, he warned.

Mr Ashworth joined Alliance Boots in November last year after spending 21 years at US pharmacy giant Walgreens. Later this month he will return to Walgreens – which will  complete its buy out of Alliance Boots in 2015 – where he will work with former Boots health and beauty chief executive Alex Gourlay.

Mr Ashworth will be replaced  by pharmacist Suzanne Hansen, who will join the Alliance Boots as director of healthcare from Walgreens this autumn.

Last week, Day Lewis chief executive Kirit Patel also slammed the decision not to lift the cap on MURs, claiming that it could lead to patients being "short-changed".

	Would you like to see more services included in the next funding agreement?