Contractors in England have less than a week left to request a recheck of their prescription payments with NHS Prescription Services (NHS PS), PSNC has warned.

Contractors can request a check of their prescription bundles dated between April 1, 2009 and March 31, 2011 before the December 31 deadline as an alternative to receiving the standard payment package for pricing errors.

The payment package, announced by PSNC in September, will see pharmacists that do not request any checks receiving a £1,500 initial payment as well as an additional sum of £500 to compensate for prescription pricing errors. Those who request a recheck will receive the initial payment as well as any underpayments they are owed, but will only receive the additional £500 if their underpayments total more than £750. However, they will also have to pay back any overpayments they have received.

PSNC negotiated the £20 million payment package as part of this year's funding, to recognise errors in the automated CIP prescription pricing system. At the time, industry leaders welcomed the package but warned that contractors may lose out by accepting the standard payment. But PSNC advised contractors only to ask for rechecks if they had seen "unusually and inexplicably" low payments.

This month, Pharmacy Voice called for "rapid and radical improvements" to prescription payments following a meeting with NHS PS on December 7. "To be fair, the NHS PS representative accepted that accuracy has not always been as it should be and acknowledged the concerns of pharmacy contractors," said Pharmacy Voice spokesperson Gareth Jones. He added that the paymaster had committed to improving payment accuracy through an "ongoing programme of work".

Full details of the error payment package are available here. For all the latest news on prescription payment errors, see C+D's Fight for Fairness campaign.