Pharmacists have demanded that the sector's paymaster be held to account following revelations that prescription pricing errors have resulted in underpayments worth more than £5 million.

Financial experts were "astounded" by the findings of C+D's Fight for Fairness investigation into the underpayments (C+D, July 2, p4), while Numark called the problems "farcical". One contractor said the situation was "totally unacceptable", and others called for the pricing authority to be held to account and to compensate pharmacists for the problems.

"There is never any mention of appropriate charge or penalty to be made to NHS Prescription Services (NHS PS) when it is found to be at fault," Barrie Smith of Paydens pharmacy group said.

The paymaster should offer compensation for the "enormous amount of work" being done by pharmacists "playing detective in finding suspect prescription batches" in which errors may have occurred, Mr Smith added.

No-one was taking ownership of the pricing problems and compensation was overdue, agreed Umesh Modi, pharmacy financial advisor at Silver Levene. "NHS PS should accept without reservation that there is a real problem with the whole system and compensate pharmacists in a one-off payment of £5,000. Anything less will not do," he said.

Raj Nutan, Numark's director of commercial operations, said the perceived practice of underpayment "would not be tolerated by any other profession".

"With the ever-increasing administrative burden placed on pharmacy, together with the immediate need to get to grips with the service agenda, it is farcical that the system for payment for the fundamental practice of dispensing medicines cannot be trusted," he added.

Two weeks ago, C+D revealed that between January 2009 and April 2011, 4,574 contractors requested checks on the pricing of their prescriptions, and the total credit adjustments made on those accounts came to over £5 million.

NHS PS acknowledged that the size of the repayment figures was "too high" and stressed its commitment to improving accuracy.

"NHS PS is continually reviewing the performance of the prescription processing system and processes, [and] this will lead to improvement to the system and manual handling processes," a spokesperson said.

A C+D investigation has revealed the causes of the errors that have plagued prescription pricing over the past two years.

Internal NHS Prescription Services (NHS PS) analyses, uncovered as part of the Fight for Fairness campaign, showed more than 50 causes of pricing errors, with mistakes made by both the automated payment system and employees.

C+D has published the full results of the monthly error analyses and now needs your help.

To conduct the analyses, the pricing authority takes a "random sample of prescription items" and investigates all errors, whether they result in overpayments or underpayments to pharmacists. C+D needs your help in analysing the data.   The downloadable spreadsheet of results lists 53 error categories, giving the number of each type of error identified in the analyses carried out in each month between March 2009 and March 2011. C+D is awaiting clarification from NHS PS on the sample sizes used in the analyses but, in the meantime, help us analyse the data and post your findings, thoughts or questions for NHS PS as a comment on this article or email them to [email protected]

Download the spreadsheet here